Traffic kills about 1.2m a year worldwide. Flying kills a few hundred.

Now tell him he’s about as likely to die of the flu as he is of a car accident.

That's not remotely true, even looking at world-wide stats. Flu kills something like 300 to 650k per year. Traffic deaths max about 1200k per year. So even in a really bad flu season, traffic is twice as likely to kill you worldwide. If you're not looking at everyone combined, and assuming your friend is between 5 and 65 the odd of dying from flu drop a lot, while the odds of a traffic deaths go way up.

The EU has 9.000 flu deaths and 19.000 traffic deaths in 2025/2026.

EDIT: I just realized if your friend is American, that's actually true. The US had 45.000 flu deaths and 36.000 traffic deaths. sidenote: the US has a population about a third smaller than the EU...

Airplanes are so much safer than cars, it's not even close. Cars are certainly more dangerous regardless of the driver, even if the safest drivers had 10x fewer deaths than average. (which is probably unrealistic, because even if you drive perfectly at 25mph, you can still be killed by some idiot going 100)

No amount of good driving can safe you against someone driving the wrong way without lights in the night on the highway, or people running red lights while you make a turn. Air travel has the innate advantage of three dimensional mobility and the drivers being under a lot more scrutiny, giving everyone a lot more space to keep distance from one another compared to roads. Also, airplanes are being inspected and repaired a lot more consequently than the average car or truck.

Also, the majority of drivers say that they are above average drivers, which tells you how well adjusted the view of driving skills is in general.

I don't think you understand just how big of a difference it is. Flying on a plane is one of the most regulated things ever, and despite crashes getting tons of media attention actully dying on a commercial flight is so rare that you are basically in no more danger on a plane than you are just sitting on a random bench in the park.

To put this in perspective in the year 2023 72 people died worldwide from aviation accidents.

In that same year 40k people died in the US alone from car accidents.

To put it further into perspective more people die on planes from random health events that just happened to occur while they were on a plane, like a cardiac event, than they do from actual plane related accidents.

When you're going down a highway at 70 mph and relying on everyone else to navigate traffic with you following the same rules, written and unwritten, it sure as hell is an illusion of control.

I'll cede that you're correct you as an individual do have more control over the vehicle you're in. However, you're still at the whims of the simulation we live in - physics doesn't just stop and the unpredictable nature of other drivers makes it impossible to have total control over the situation.

Even driving alone on a road there are animals that could jump out, or a pothole or debris etc etc. That's like the maximum control you can have and even then it's not absolute.

I think, unfortunately, it will take widespread adoption of self-driving cars to reduce accident fatalities much further from where they are now. But that's not likely to happen for many years on, cars and horses were hanging out together on roads for a long time afaik - feel free to correct me.

Anyways I get your point , and anecdotally I'm sure we all have had moments driving where we thought "if I wasn't driving the car would have gotten into an accident" so yeah I'd say we all have that same feeling.

They're not being logically consistent. Being afraid of flying, but okay with driving is inherently irrational. Driving is far more dangerous

The best driver in the world is at far more risk than the average commercial jet

It's an incredible difference in safety. Cars are not safe

The majority of people involved in automobile collisions are not at fault. Yes, "good" drivers (who still make mistakes on account of fragile carbon bodies) have less risk, but we're talking a fraction of a fraction here.

Air France 447 is why I hate flying and has everything to do with control.

my mother has been backed into while in traffic by two different handy busses in two different towns 3 years apart

both cars totaled