alt Hacker News> It's probably about right to compare the risk profile to motorcycle riding.
I'd say it's probably not, many motorcycle riders deliberately choose a motorcycle because it's "fun", meaning they go around speeding on purpose, so the crash stats are very negatively skewed by those deliberately behaving recklessly, just how driving crash stats are skewed by people driving under the influence.
That's a bit of a different approach than to flying a plane, and yet GA is super dangerous. That's because unlike motorcycling, flying is inherently unsafe, there's no "just stop" option if you have an issue. The default is crashing. The only reason commercial aviation is so safe is the incredible effort that's been put into engineering safety systems at thousands of layers, from mechanical to human factors, but hardly any of that applies to GA.
So IMO, if you ride as responsibly as you fly, riding should be way safer.
There are classes of motorcycle accidents that are not a function of rider speeding or otherwise being careless. The one that took the life of a coworker is described as follows: the motorcycle is travelling on a country two-lane road, trees alongside, sunny day, and a vehicle comes from the other direction and turns left across the path of the motorcycle. At closing speed over 160 kph (80- 100 kph in opposite directions) the gap is closing at over 45 m/s and dappled lighting makes it hard to see the motorcycle even with a daytime headlight. Years after my friend's death I read a chapter in a book on forensic engineering which covered the situation in detail (not my coworker's death specifically, but this class of motorcycle accident as a recognized pattern).