I Think David Grusch is Implying That Aliens Operate the 10th Largest Airline in Human History.

Unless they suck at flying far, far, far more than humans do.

I don’t spend a lot of time writing commentary on reddit threads, but this evening I had a thought and wanted to share.

I recently came across this interview clip featuring David Grusch about crashed alien spaceships. Now, I know literally nothing about David Grusch, who he is, or his validity, other than he’s in the news at the moment, and people are taking his statements seriously. I’m not actually trying to say anything good or bad about him; I’m more fascinated by the thought experiment, and what it implies about how realistic finding multiple crashed alien spacecraft may be.

In the comments on Reddit, someone joked that aliens must be really bad at flying spaceships to crash that often, and it got me thinking… how bad would they have to actually be for those to be realistic numbers?

If you assume that aliens are at least as good as humans at not crashing things, and use the standard safety numbers from human aviation, how many flights would aliens need to be making each year to result in multiple alien crash sites?

I did some back-of-the-napkin calculations, and realized that unless aliens suck far, far, far, far, far more than humans at not crashing into things, David’s claims imply that aliens have been flying enough flights each year to rival Alaska Airlines for several years in a row.

So, here’s the thoughts… check me on these…

First, Mr. Grusch says in the interview that we have found “quite a number” of non-human, alien spacecraft crashed on earth. I don’t know what “quite a number” means, but let’s arbitrarily say that’s 10 spaceships over the last 10 years.

A quick Google search finds that there are roughly 100,000 human flights per day in the world (commercial, cargo, and private), or about 36,500,000 per year. Of those, an average of 70 to 90 airplanes crash a year, again, counting both commercial and private flights — I assume mostly private crashes, not 747s.

That’s about 0.00024% of flights that crash each year.

That’s how good or bad humans are at flying in earth’s atmosphere. So, to get “quite a few” extraterrestrial shipwrecks, we’re back to that 10 over 10 number.

If aliens crash spaceships as often as humans crash airplanes, they’d need to have flown ~4,166,000 flights over areas where the US will find them when they crash. That, times the 0.00024% crash rate of human aviation, would result in about 10 crashes.

Spaced over our arbitrary 10 years, that would be equal to 416,600 flights per year, right about the (admittedly rough) estimate of 422,000 flights a year of Alaska Airlines, the 10th largest airline in the world.

BUT… needless to say, I think it’s likely that we would have noticed 416,600 flights a year in human airspace over the last 10 years. Or 200,000 over 20. Or 100,000 over 40.

But of course, if you wanted to get more detailed about it, David Grusch’s information comes mostly from the US intelligence services, as I understand it. Those “quite a number” of crashes would also likely need to land in places that the US could access, so, probably not China or Russia, or similar. In which case, it may not be 10 crashes… just 10 crashes in US-accessible areas. It could be we should be comparing regional crash rates, instead of global. And what of crashes no humans ever find at all, like in the ocean, where finding even known lost airplanes can be incredibly difficult?

So I don’t know— I have to admit I find those numbers pretty hard to overcome. Because I don’t really believe that an alien species that’s capable of traveling between worlds would have such an astronomically greater crash rate on earth than humans do… nor do I believe that aliens have been operating the 10th largest airline in the world for the last ten years without us knowing.

After all, I have looked, and seen zero airline advertisements. It may also be difficult to advertise when you fly into things so frequently.

Now I’ll go and watch the full interview and see how much of a fool I made of myself in late night writings. :)

POST-WRITING THOUGHT:

After I wrote this, I rewatched the clip and realized that David Grusch says that the ships are either crashed or landed. So, it’s possible that almost all of the spaceships in his telling were simply captured when on the ground, not actually crashed. Or that they were shot down, which thankfully isn’t something that commercial airlines generally have to worry about. But I still feel that the way he talked about it in the clip implies crashed more than captured. And the numbers are still generally true, even if that’s the case. Just assume it’s 5 crashes and 5 captures, cut the math in half above, and it becomes the 20th or 30th largest airline, instead of the 10th. Either way, I had too much fun writing the thought experiment, so leaving it here. :)

POST-WRITING THOUGHT 2:

Let’s be fair to the alien safety record…

I was just thinking about this a bit more, and also have to say that if I’m being totally fair to the aliens, travel safety is normally measured by accidents per mile traveled, not per trip.

So in all fairness to the safety rate of our friendly alien airlines, that probably works in their favor. The nearest potentially habitable star we know of is ~24,690,225,000,000 miles away. I’m not running the numbers, but my guess is that they could fly directly from their home world and do nothing but crash straight into a mountain here and still have a pretty good per mile safety record. haha.