Does plane travel need to be this safe?

[Lemur866]

What’s the evidence that radically reducing the safety standards for air travel would result in cheaper airfares?

[Llama_Llogophile]

I fly airplanes for a living, and I’ll turn the question around - What other industries SHOULD be regulated to same extent as aviation?

The rules I work under are so complex and demanding that I sometimes get annoyed when I hear about the rate of accidents or malfeasance in fields like medicine and banking. One doctor friend of mine tells me his field would benefit from something like the FAA to oversee it because the rate of medical errors is scandalously high, and it’s comparitively easy to hide them.

This doesn’t imply a punitive approach though. One thing aviation is very smart about is allowing no-jeopardy error reporting (although not under all circumstances). This permits data gathering that a more punitive system would not.

Forgive the hijack - I’ll start another thread if anyone is interested in exploring this.

[Icarus]

Couple of thoughts -

[ul]
[li]Regarding the OP equating cost with lower safety - while it is probably true that lowering costs would lower safety, I’m not sure the opposite is true - that lowering safety would lower costs. IMHO these two factors are not inextricably linked in that way. So, if the problem you are trying to solve is perceived cost of air travel, then reducing safety isn’t necessarily really a path to return on investment. [/li][/ul]

[ul]
[li]Comparing auto safety with airline safety - we seem to have numbers on auto fatalities, but how many auto accidents happen that don’t result in any serious harm? You would really have to capture that kind of number to make a comparison to air travel accidents. Whereas individual air travel accidents likely have a higher percentage of serious harm, in spite of all the safety measures in place.[/li][/ul]

[steronz]

@Lemur866

What’s the evidence that radically reducing the safety standards for air travel would result in cheaper airfares?

Hard to find evidence, but based on a Wendover video from a few months back about how an airline ticket breaks out, some of the biggest line items are initial cost of the plane, maintenance, and fees. That’s something like 70% of a ticket right there. If you get rid of all of the redundant systems, decrease the safety factor in all components, increase maintenance schedules on everything, and slash oversight, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get to a 40% reduction in the cost of a ticket.

Just a wag though, too lazy to show my work.

[MandaJo]

@Xema

Not really.

An important reason is how much effect the actions and habits of the driver have on the auto accident rate. If you fasten your belts, don’t drink and drive, avoid excessive speed, adjust your driving to weather conditions, etc. your chance of being killed in a car crash can be dramatically lower than the national average.

This. This is everything. A person at a motorcycle, drunk, at night in the rain has a vastly different chance of dying in a car accident than sober me, in a relatively safe car, driving defensively. We get averaged together for that number, but that average isn’t what should guide my choices.

Furthermore, air travel should be compared to interstate travel. You still have to drive to the airport, after all. It’s my understanding that most fatal accidents happen on roads, especially rural roads, not highways and especially not interstate highways.

I’m not afraid of flying, but if you take all the factors into account, I’m not at all sure that my risk of death is so much higher when I drive myself to Houston than if I flew there–especially if I drive on a sunny day when I am not tired (and, obviously, when I am sober).

[Voyager]

@Rocketeer

I used to work in airplane certification. A commercial airliner is designed so that the probability of any combination of failures which causes a catastrophic event (hull loss and major number of fatalities) per flight hour is 1 / 10**9. A great deal of statistical and probability analysis is done to ensure that. I seriously doubt that any such analysis is done for automobiles–but I strongly believe that a similar criteria should be applied to self-driving cars.

I’ve heard some talks on automotive electronics. Reliability standards aren’t nearly this high, but you can be sure that failure probability calculations are done by the reliability people. Hell, we did them for compute servers, which have far less severe consequences when they fail.
I also know that there is a good bit of failover done when one component breaks, especially critical ones.
Look how much more reliable cars have gotten over the past 40 years. That happened for a reason.

[Voyager]

@adaher

I acknowledge the point though that car travel is much safer if you’re doing it right, which is why I’ve always wondered why cities and states see traffic enforcement primarily as a revenue measure rather than making a real effort to make safety a priority. It also seems that making driving nearly universal is a higher priority than making sure the people that do drive do it well. We really should cull the herd, IMO. We’d probably reduce traffic deaths by a huge number if we just took away the licenses of the worst 10% of drivers.

Our police departments are out in force doing alcohol checks on big drinking days and weeks, and that isn’t for revenue.

[Voyager]

@Riemann

But I think the main relevant statistic is deaths among rail passengers, which is a far lower number, only around 5% of total deaths according to the paper linked below. The majority of deaths associated with rail transport are from trespassers and suicides, and I don’t think those should be factored into considerations of the safety of rail travel. I’m not quite sure how to think about some other associated types of death such collisions at road crossings, that would not occur if trains didn’t exist - I have little doubt that the majority of accidents at crossings are caused by the actions of the car drivers.

https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/docs/Rail%20Safety%20Statistics%20Report.pdf

Suicide by rail, which is disturbingly prevalent in Palo Alto, do get publicized locally. Big train crashes, like big plane crashes, get publicized locally. Deaths in small planes get reported regionally also, and I suspect many people underestimate them and over estimate commercial accidents.