The most dangerous jobs in America

I don't buy into pilots being so high up. They had to have thrown in GA fatalities with airlines pilots. More police officers are killed every year than airline pilots, and look where they are on the list.

That is ironic considering that air travel is dubbed the safest way to travel.

Well, they didn't specify the type of pilot so they must have put GA figures in there as well Clint, but they did say flight engineers. Gives you pause to wonder just how dated that thing is with so many 2 man crews out their now and other than some of the heavies, FE's are going away. Did I miss something?????

That's when you want to look at the raw numbers, these overall numbers don't make sense.

Many of these data have been lumped together for it is well known that taxi drivers have a very high mortality rate and those data can be stratified even further into inner city vs. more rural and day versus night. On the other hand, private limo drivers are most likely quite low.

Frankly, I would not want to be in the pizza delivery business or a night clerk at a Stop and Rob.

When they say flight engineers, they are referring to personnel onboard an aircraft that is being tested. They are not referring to GA, as workplace fatalities have nothing to do with GA. Due to the low number of test pilots and test flight engineers, the fatalities that do occur make the average rate very high.

http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfch0009.pdf

There's the source. Page 19 seems to say that 78 "Aircraft pilots and flight engineers" died of work-related injuries in 2010... Clearly there's something fishy with either the number or the job description, or I'm really missing something big...

I suspect they included EMS helicopter pilots in the group. If helicopter pilots were broken out and normalized over several years, they would be #1.

You expect accuracy and fact checks from MSN? HA!

The key is reading the static. It is death per 100,000 workers. Well the number of active professional pilots and flight engineers is nowhere near 100,000. If we look at aerobatic demo, military, flight test, cargo and I suspect any pilot holding a commercial ticket etc pilot, who has suffered an untimely demise, we get a better handle of the data. Extrapolate the actual number of professional pilots and flight engineers out to 100,000 workers. Then apply this logic to the number of deaths and you come up with a number that distorts the danger, but makes headlines.

Well, any way you look at it, what goes up will come down, whether controlled or uncontrolled. In most case, results are not that good when it comes down uncontrolled.

Actually if there's 78 deaths in 2010, and 70.6 per 100,000 workers... that would mean there's 110,481 "aircraft pilots and flight engineers". Something doesn't quite add up.

I would have thought that the men & women who work on the flight decks of aircraft carriers would have been on the list.

Clint605, keep in mind that there are also far more police officers and sheriffs than there are professional pilots. NYPD, LAPD and LACo Sheriff account for nearly 60,000 sworn law officers. There are only about 150,000 ATP's in the entire US.

Well, it's like the last line in dmanuel's comment: "you come up with a number that distorts the danger, but makes headlines."