They also tend to be less well maintained, and the other participants less trained.
I'm not sure why I was downvoted, because I'm just stating I'd like to understand (data/studies) instead of people's anecdotes and opinions, including my own.
My intuition is that car travel has a constant level of risk, whereas plane travel has a level of risk much below that when everything is good but (I'm guessing here) that risk goes much higher than the constant risk of car travel when something goes wrong (failure, human mistake, crash, birds, weather, etc.). I've searched for it before and didn't find anything, but it'd be nice to see any studies that confirm or deny this.
For example, if a turning vehicle cuts off oncoming traffic, it could get hit. An attentive driver in the oncoming lane might see the problem and hit the brakes, while an inattentive or speeding driver might not react in time. The turning vehicle is at fault, but that doesn't mean they were the only one that could have prevented the collision.
There are sometimes events you cannot control, but a lot of those multi-vehicle collisions were preventable by either party.
While I have no hard stats I would also assume that a plane is much safer when something goes wrong. Why?
1) Professional 'driver' who has trained for years to handle risks and failure scenarios and practices these on a regular basis.
2) Redundancy and graceful failure is designed into many of the components and systems on a plane, while cars tend towards the cheapest component or system possible unless mandated by law.
3) Space (both altitude and the fact that the sky is basically empty) provides time to solve some problems before they become catastrophic failures and makes other classes of problems very unlikely.
If you blow a tire, run into a deer, or have a transmission failure while you are cruising down the highway at 80mph you have seconds (at most) to react and respond. If a plane hits birds, has an engine fail, or loses some other system they usually have minutes to troubleshoot the problem and redundant systems that prevent the plane from just falling out of the sky.
When they happen all you do it move over and come to a stop. Unless you go Full Redditor(TM) and start adding a bunch of extreme control inputs none of these things are that bad. They don't require much reaction at all even if you are paralyzed by indecision it can still turn out fine since all you have to do is stop.
Blowouts are a non-event, IMO, just a flat tire with an extra audio alert.
Automatic transmissions basically don't fail in unsafe ways. Worst case you'll find some extra neutrals and make an ass out of yourself failing to merge or something. Splitting the case on a manual (like you might do if you go for 4th and somehow find 2nd, or jump a vehicle and don't mash the clutch before hitting the ground) is surprisingly uneventful from a maintaining control perspective.
Deer suck, mostly because they tend to break a bunch of expensive cosmetic bits.
Having a hood fly up on you is worse than any of the above events because you can't see. Brake failure kinda sucks too, especially with an automatic trans.
The main difference is when a car has a catastrophic failure there’s a good chance the people involved survive.
I've had an engine failure in my car while driving it. I simply was able to slow to a crawl until I got home. I don't think engine failure on an airplane is such an anti-climatic event, on average.
It often is, actually. They have more than one engine precisely for that scenario, and can fly quite well with one down. Flights over water are also carefully planned based on distance to the nearest airport with an engine out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS
Even if you lose all four on a 747, there’s surprisingly large amounts of time to troubleshoot if you’re at cruise.
