> by what possible metric

Micromorts, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

The relevant bits here - deaths from all causes in the US are 22 micromorts per day. Lower in the article, airline travel is listed as 1 micromort per 1000 miles travelled.

Background risk of death from non-natural causes are listed as 1.6 per day; many of those non-natural causes do not exist in an airplane cabin (e.g. you probably aren't going to be murdered because no one has anything more effective than a plastic spork, you probably aren't going to kill yourself, you probably won't be hit by a car). So it seems reasonable to say that being inside an airliner cabin is safer than being outside of one.

Also, this is probably confounded by many super-old or super-sick people not choosing to fly - if you are in an airliner, you are probably healthier than the average person.

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tshaddox 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> e.g. you probably aren't going to be murdered because no one has anything more effective than a plastic spork

Except for the occasional murder who has access to the flight controls.

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rogerrogerr 18 hours ago | parent [-]

“Occasional” implies a rate at least several orders of magnitude higher than actual.

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JCharante 16 hours ago | parent [-]

if it happens once a decade occasional sounds right

	▲	rogerrogerr 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So far this year alone, there have been 31,000,000 flights. https://www.airportia.com/flights-monitor/. So somewhere around 300,000,000 flights per decade. If someone said an event happens “occasionally”, I would expect it to be significantly more frequent than 1/300,000,000. Powerball lottery odds are 1 in 292 million. I wouldn’t say that I “occasionally” win the lottery when I buy a ticket!

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watwut 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

All causes deaths and living room deaths are not the same. Even if we count hearth attack in living room as living room death, we still must substract car crashed, bedroom deaths, hospitals deaths, garden deaths.