They're not safer than cars if i remember right. Small planes are a lot more dangerous statistically per hour or mile travelled. Going per hour general aviation is 24 times more lethal https://avweb.com/insider/why-we-dont-care-about-fatal-accidents/ and yeah the link is bait to get you to read.

"If the automobile fatal accident rate were equivalent to GA’s fatal rate, we would kill more than 800,000 people a year and your car insurance would cost $25,000. "

The guy who chartered the flight ran this company - https://retention.com/

You're a bit confused on the stats

The planes that have the most accidents are general aviation (GA) planes, not chartered private jets like this

GA is the actual small planes. 2-4 seaters usually. It's also the least experiences pilots, usually pilots building hours to be in the airlines or charters

Charters follow a lot, but not all, of the same safety regulations as commercial airlines. They do still have more accidents, for a variety of reasons

Charter companies play an important role in the pilot pipeline. Many commercial pilots work at charters while they build hours to get their ATP to be able to work at a commercial airline

If they couldn't work at a charter, they would have to instead fly in circles to build hours. A suboptmial outcome

The consequences of it failing are just too high.

Mile per mile, cars are more deadly. If the concern is safety, you'd have to start there

I love how they call them 'business jets' instead of millionaire transports. because honestly.

It almost hit mar a lago. I say we keep allowing them until we get a bullseye.

All airplanes are safer than all cars, per passenger mile.

Small planes are dramatically more dangerous than commercial airliners. No, this wasn't a Cessna, but still.

Maybe they should be outlawed for environmental reasons, but private jets operated by professional service providers as in this case aren't the "small planes" with the high crash rates. It's the ones with piston engines and inexperienced owner-pilots that crash a lot.

Even those are roughly comparable to cars in terms of injury and death rates for a comparable trip. Driving is one of the most dangerous things the average person does, so that's not exactly good, but it seems to be within most peoples' risk tolerance.

So apparently the rates of crashes in general aviation are set off by drunk pilots in Alaska specifically. If you exclude alcohol-related crashes in Alaska, general aviation starts to look a lot safer.

As opposed to cars, which have famously few consequences when things go wrong.

I wish they would all switch to submarines

I remember sometime back that some rich bloke was talking about cutting cost for maintenance in airliners. Part of me wants to say that somebody got the message and started cutting corners for private jets first.

Nobody needs X is a moot point. You also don't need the vast majority of your possessions. Some things are simply nice to have, especially when you can afford them. There are just things that you don't like other people having.

Also, the chance of you dying on a place crash either as a passenger or a person on the ground is astronomically small. 104 people died in a car crash yesterday in the US alone and this is true for every single day of the year.