Here is an interesting article about aviation safety: http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2012/10/43_months_since_last_deadly_ai.html
Commercial aviation has become so safe that most suggested additional improvements are no longer cost effective. Eventually, sometime in the future, radically new and improved aviation technology will emerge, such as cold fusion. Cold fusion will greatly reduced fatalities because it will eliminate deaths from burning chemical fuel. With changes like this aviation will become even safer than it is now, at no additional cost. It will be both cheaper and safer. What we have now is a technology that has been developed to its practical limits. Aviation has reached a plateau, albeit a temporary one. It cannot be made much safer as long as we use chemical-fuel power jet turbine engines that work at high temperatures and spin rapidly. We will always have problems such as engines disintegrating at high speeds, failing during flight, or igniting the fuel tanks. Along similar lines, automobiles fatalities per passenger mile are much lower than they used to be. Automobiles driven by human beings are probably close to the practical limits of safety. To make them far safer, and to reduce fatalities from 30,000 per year to close to zero per year, we must have fully-automatic robotic automobiles. I doubt it will be possible to reduce automobile deaths to zero anytime in the next few hundred years. Anything moving that fast is bound to fail and kill some number of people every year. I predict that automobile accidents will become so rare, they will be national headline news. There will Congressional investigations launched when 5 or 10 people are killed in a single day. In a particularly bad year after a thousand people are killed, news pundits and Members of Congress will say, "why aren't we doing more to improve road safety and reduce these tragedies." From our point of view, they will be fretting about a non-existent problem -- a problem they have already solved. From the point of view of people in 1850, our present angst about the safety of vaccines for infectious disease would make no sense. We worry about ~50 people dying from vaccines per year, whereas if we did not have those vaccines, with our population millions of people would die every year from diseases such as tetanus, measles and diphtheria. See: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/G/cases&deaths.PDF Still, it makes sense for us to agonize about those 50 people, and to try to do something the problem. A century from now it will make sense for the Congress and the regulatory agencies to try to reduce automobile deaths from ~1000 per year down to 100 or so. When today's aviation technologies are finally replaced, we might move on to aircraft which are so safe, we can have small, individual, robot-controlled "air cars" or air taxis for individual use. These will be far safer than today's automobiles. I know they will be, because if they are not, the public will not use them. - Jed
