I keep hearing that flight is the safest form of travel. But I also keep hearing about planes that crash, or going missing. When's the last time you heard about a train going missing? I also don't as often hear about commercial passenger ships sinking. I wonder why that is.
Trains don't go missing per se, because they're on fixed routes by definition (i.e. tracks). But they do crash.
Many ships do go missing but they tend to be small vessels - large passenger ships do sink - the Costa Concordia for example, and if you live in the UK you can't possibly have failed to note the plight of migrants into the EU, where around 1000 are drowning per week in the Med. (pax cruise ships spend quite a while in costal waters (so the pax can see something), under radar coverage and tend to have satellite comms/telemetry, so again, trick to vanish).
Aircraft, by virtue of the fact that they can fly mostly anywhere and that radar coverage is not universal, do 'vanish' - except they don't really vanish, they crash and are either somewhere inhostpitable/remote, are destroyed into many many little pieces, or end up in the ocean which is a vast area with difficult depth and pressure issues, which mankind still has not mapped more than a small proportion.
So it's not really surprising that aircraft go missing but trains and large passenger ships don't.
There is also an order of magnitude more flights than train or ship journeys, hence it's statistically safer. But a plane crash makes great headlines in ways train derailments in other countries don't...
In 2016, the cruise industry estimates it'll carry 22.9 million passengers. Air passengers for the same year are estimated at 3.6 BILLION.... If you sink one ship and loose 400 people, to have the same level of deaths per head in air travel you'd have to crash 115 Airbus A380s...