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Private single-engine planes (under GA) have somewhere around the same or worse fatality rates to riding a motorcycle. Don't think I'll go up in one, at least while my kids aren't yet adults.
Riding a motorcycle or flying GA is only 3x more lethal than driving and just as lethal as walking (75% of walking fatalities occur at night and are entirely due to cars).
The big difference is on a motorcycle, the danger is other drivers, whereas for a pilot, the danger comes from themselves as 90% of fatal accidents are caused by pilot error.
Eliminating pilot error is entirely possible as demonstrated by the commercial airline industry, which ends of being the safest form of travel by multiple magnitudes over cars. If GA pilots can hold themselves to the same rigorous standards as commercial airline transport pilots, then GA can absolutely be much safer than driving.
I checked the stats in my country, where 55% of contributing factors are assigned to motorcyclists in collisions involving them. Due to how this data is produced, that doesn't mean 55% of accidents involving them were found to be the fault of motorcyclists, but it means that a significant number of motorbike accidents are the fault of the rider, whichever way you slice it.
Rates of serious injury/death are about 2000 per billion passenger miles for motorbikes, of which 100 are deaths. Haven't been able to find the same stats for GA though.
There are arguments that comparing passenger-miles isn't reasonable for activities like GA and motorbiking which are done for pleasure as well as for transport, in which case flying looks worse.
All of my analysis comes from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, particularly information published in 2024. You are right--It is very, very difficult to normalize the data across different modes, however my analysis is specifically over passenger-miles, but I also did it over passenger-hour exposure, which is significantly worse because you can cover more distance in a shorter amount of time.
I wrote a section on the subject in a paper that is currently under academic review at CHI, but I ultimately cut the section. I should write it into a blog at some point.
Risk assessment is tricky business, and I've spent countless hours in discussion with colleagues over the topic. Humans, even highly attuned academics, are inherently terrible at assessing risk for low-frequency events. While we like to say things like one is 3x more likely than the other, it often lacks the context of scale. A lack of context often results in overly cautious recommendations that encourage people to live like a bubble-boy. I've advocated in the past that all academic journals should adopt a common risk metric, like the micromort when reporting on risk.
There are 800,000 pilots in the US, and an average of 300 deaths per year or 3.75 per 10,000 pilots. There are 243 million drivers in the US and 40,000 deaths per year, or 1.6 per 10,000 drivers. While one is higher than the other, they are still incredibly small frequency events, and our ape brains are not capable of adequately reasoning over that concept.
Yeah that is important context.
Looking at UK government stats the difference is starker here - over 100 deaths per billion passenger miles for motorcyclists, only 3 for car occupants, and 27 for pedestrians.
The note of panic in my mum's voice when talking about the possibility of my getting a motorbike is still out of proportion though.