Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

When a scheduled aviation passenger plane crashes.

GA (General Aviation, "private pilots") flights crash all the time, people in them even die most days. If it happened in their catchment it'd probably make your local TV news, but it won't be their main story and it won't be a national headline unless somebody "important" died. A few hundred people die this way, in the US, in a normal year.

The reasons are much the same as for private car ownership:

- The private pilot cuts corners. They cut corners on maintenance and fuel, they cut corners on training, they cut corners on procedures. So their plane may fail more often than it should, or when one thing goes wrong there's less slack left than there should be.

- The private pilot is subject to very relaxed medical requirements, especially in the US. So too often these pilots will become disabled in flight, and they're usually alone or with a non-pilot so if this happens they're probably dead.

- The private pilot's skills are poor, they're subject to minimal day-to-day oversight and few of them seek real development of their skills once qualified. This means when things go wrong the pilot is less likely to successfully recover from a situation which was salvageable.

- "Mission mindset" easily creeps in for private pilots. Particularly for weather, but also for loss of daylight, private pilots often have a purpose (e.g. "Get back in time for Sarah's wedding on Saturday" or "Fit in one more trip to the lake before winter") which causes them to make unwise decisions to press on into poor weather, deteriorating daylight, etc.

There have been 20 commercial aviation incidents in the last 20 years in the US of any type and size that included any fatalities by any means. 7 of those included jets, with 1 being a 777, one a 767, and everything else 737 or smaller. A 767 costs about 100 million (list price 200, but the internet says you always get discounts..?)

So we'll ridiculously overestimate the per year cost of airplanes at 100 million, assuming fallaciously that these airplanes are always totaled (they're not) and that they're always 767s (they're not).

On the other hand, let's assume (optimistically) that fatal car crashes always total two people per car, and that they all occur in affordable $10,000 cars (the average new car last year cost almost 5x that at 47K). That gets you 10,000*20,000, or 200 million per year in auto costs.

Uninsured drivers who can pay compensation if they cause harm aren't the problem. The problem is uninsured drivers who are judgment proof, i.e., who have no significant assets with which to pay compensation. The way that problem is currently handled for driving is for auto insurance policies to include coverage if you get hit by an uninsured driver who can't pay compensation.

But, you say, what if I get killed by that uninsured driver? The answer is that you're already at risk from that today, because someone that reckless isn't going to be deterred by anything, since they're not reasonable people to begin with. In other words, the basic problem you point out, that some people aren't deterred by reasonable incentives against reckless actions, is a valid problem, but can't be solved by social engineering. Your only defense against drivers like that is to drive defensively so that you aren't the one that ends up being their victim. And more generally, your only defense against people who genuinely aren't deterred by reasonable incentives against reckless behavior is to avoid them.

In motorbike in contrast, you touch a wet patch or a gravel bit and it slides right away, 2 minor accidents like that for a total of ~8 weeks driving motorbikes (minor since I knew there was gravel/water and was going really slow).