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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

"Passengers more freedom in deciding what's safe for them"

This makes it seem like reasonable defaults are absent; "safe for them" is a one-size-fits-all when we are talking about air travel.

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Not really. There are airlines who hire young low paid unskilled pilots, there are pilots from various countries with different English skills, there are pilots who didn't get enough sleep last night. Then there are airports that have different standards for security, different border-control waiting time, different luggage waiting time & equipment, different ground-crew serving the airplane. All this information is obscured from the passengers, but it doesn't mean it's not affecting safety, because it is.

The differences you name can be factors in any given crash, but only in combination, because many things have to go wrong for a crash to happen.

Also, the number of crashes is so low that each crash happens under unique circumstances.

Also, people are pretty irrational about rare risks.

So such differences may affect safety, but not in a way that will affect the market price in any useful way.

Allowing individuals to adjust the safety levers means more people will die, because the vast majority of individuals who use air travel are not qualified or informed enough to make good decisions about these things. More people will die unnecessarily than under the current system.

People don't need to make those decisions. Currently, safety decisions are made by the government, which really doesn't have any competition and thus is not incentivized to improve its set of regulations. If you had 2-3 companies providing market review for the passengers, I'm pretty sure the situation would improve, not deteriorate. Perhaps some regulations simply don't make any sense and do not improve safety, but you'd never know that until you have one agency managing it.

Safety decisions are not made by the government. They are made by IATA.

Airline safety is currently in a state where it is nearly indistinguishable from perfect. Accident rates are so low that it's no longer possible to put an accurate number on the risk of taking a flight. And all of this has been done while keeping ticket prices at extremely low levels. It would be remarkable for any change to this to result in an improvement, since there's almost nowhere to go but down.

The FAA has a policy of "one safety standard for all airlines" for passenger flights.

Obviously that's nonsense, as regional and major airlines have totally different resources.

I don't fly regionals, and I tell my family not to.

Before August 2015, regionals used low-hour pilots sleeping at the airport, resulting in the Colgan accident.

After August 2015 (post-Colgan), Congress increased pilot experience requirements to ATP minimums of 1,500 hours. All of the regional airlines are in the process of closing down as a result.

Well, the other thing affecting the regionals is that while lots of people have the skills to be pilots and many even have the training, there are increasingly few who have the skills and training and are willing to put up with the wages and conditions of the regionals. And since the regionals are the only way to get funneled into the mainline structure of the big US carriers, we get the much-discussed "pilot shortage".

If by "increasingly few" you mean "virtually none" in 2016, then you're correct.

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