Most Inspiring Jobs Question:

Commercial flying is pretty safe. In general, it is less risky to fly than drive a car. Why do pilots make the list? For one, pilots spend substantially more time in flight than the average person does in a car, and because cars can not carry hundreds of people at a time and most people do not have the training or the ridiculous amount of money it costs to own their own plane, the number of pilots is far, far fewer than the numbers of drivers. This means that if something happens to a single pilot, the ratio of danger per pilot is far more greatly affected than if a single driver gets sideswiped by a milk truck. Another factor is the stark fact that running out of gas or having a mechanical failure is far more serious at 45,000 feet in the air than in the drive-thru lane of your local fast food. But probably the largest factor in this is that piloting is a unique job that includes many people who fly things that are not big, well-staffed commercial airliners. People who fly planes like crop dusters, or those with dangerous careers who fly small planes close to the ground and have a much higher risk of having an unfortunate accident than Captain Smith of Luxury Air.