In the last decade, two passengers have been killed in accidents on US commercial airlines. Over the same period, more than 365,000 Americans have been killed by cars.

Yet it was the safety of the US air travel system that was the subject of a damning, genuinely terrifying New York Times investigation last weekend — detailing lapses in the oversight of flights that are leading to near-crashes multiple times a week. The pattern led one air traffic controller to declare: “It is only a matter of time before something catastrophic happens.”

That statement captures something essential about the way that US air travel is regulated: society expects absolute safety in plane travel, catastrophes are never meant to happen, and any loss of human life is considered unacceptable. A vast federal bureaucracy exists to make sure no one dies in a plane crash. So, what would happen if we treated cars like we do planes?

At this point, some people might find reasons to explain away America’s rate of road carnage, or argue that it’s unfair to compare car safety and plane safety. Many more Americans ride in cars in any given year than fly. Flights put passengers in a position of unusual vulnerability, where they’re at the mercy of highly trained, uniformed professionals — so public trust is essential for the system to work — whereas anyone could drive a car. Maybe it’s just harder to control the behavior of 200 million-plus individuals who have to drive a car just to get by in America than it is to maintain a cadre of credentialed pilots and air traffic controllers.

There are solutions, if we want them

These aren’t good excuses for our failure to prevent mass death. In reality, there’s a lot we can learn from the aviation system’s approach to passenger safety.

The most obvious is that we shouldn’t accept carnage just because the activity seems inherently dangerous. If we can figure out how to make it exceptionally safe to hurtle through the sky at over 500 miles per hour, we can definitely figure out how to keep people alive on the ground, especially because other countries have done it already. The Netherlands is a famous example, but others, including Canada, with an urban geography much more similar to ours, have steadily decreased their death rates to levels far lower than ours.

A second lesson from the aviation sector is that safety is a systemic responsibility. “The [air] safety regime, with its built-in redundancies, is known in aviation circles as the Swiss cheese model: If a problem slips through a hole in one layer, it will be caught by another,” the New York Times explained, which has added up to a near-spotless safety record.

Compare that to the situation in car safety, where high death rates are accepted as a baseline part of how the system works rather than an institutional failure. Media coverage treats surges in crash deaths as if they are uncontrollable fluctuations in the weather and blames people driving recklessly for getting themselves killed. In the American traffic engineering bureaucracy, there’s a widely circulated myth that the vast majority of crashes are caused by “human error,” transportation writer David Zipper explained in the Atlantic in 2021.

Read the full article about car and air travel safety by Marina Bolotnikova at Vox.