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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

I think the current level of airline security is overkill, but I'm always a little surprised to see people advocating for having none. In the late 60s and early 70s, US airliners were getting hijacked at a rate of once every week or two. Once basic security screening was introduced, it became far more rare.

Making people take off their shoes and empty their water bottles is a bit silly, but basic checks for guns and bombs are a good idea.

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Keep in mind too, there are also things like air marshals and bullet proof cockpit doors that can't be opened from the outside and other measures like that.

Not all the security improvements are at the screening check level.

Very true, I did not mean to imply that all of the new stuff is bad. Air marshals and solid cockpit doors are both excellent ideas.

    In the late 60s and early 70s, US airliners were
    getting hijacked at a rate of once every week or two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings is pretty dramatic

Hijacking was pretty different back then, which is why passengers were used to the idea of staying uninvolved and not escalating things. That's part of why 9/11 was just a (culturally) unimaginable shift, it wasn't really in the gestalt that a hijacker's main goal was other than to kill/die.

Yeah, 9/11 could work exactly once (and even then, it only in three out of four concurrent attempts attempts)

We could lose an entire airliner once a month to terrorism, with everyone on board dying, and air travel would still be 100 times safer than driving a car.

No way. That would be something like 3,000 deaths per year, versus 30,000-40,000 per year for cars. Airliners do about 1/7th the passenger miles that cars do, so the fatality rate would be pretty close. It would still be a bit safer than driving, but not much. Certainly not 100 times safer.

You have to look at total passenger-miles. Currently planes are over 1000 times safer. I think it actually might approach 10,000.

I did: http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...

For 2014, the latest year listed, airlines did 607,772 million passenger miles, highway vehicles did 4,371,706 million.

The current level of safety can't be accurately measured, because airline fatalities don't happen often enough. Whatever the level is, it's far better than cars. But the hypothetical one-full-plane-crash-per-month scenario does not compare particularly favorably to cars.

Maybe the figure was 10 times safer then. A plane carries an average of 200-300 people. One flight per month is somewhere between 2400-3600. Current highway fatalities number about 35,000. So the ten times figure works.

That said, I feel like either passenger-miles figure is either too low for airlines or too high for vehicles. I remember the study I had read had them much different.

Ten times fewer fatalities and seven times fewer passenger miles means safety is nearly the same. Not ten times better.

Check out these charts:

Injured persons by transportation mode: http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...

Total Accidents by mode: http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...

Rates for Air fatalities: http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...

Rate for Vehicle fatalities. http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...

The two key numbers here I think are: Fatality Rate per 100 million vehicle-miles: 1.10 (2013) and Fatality Rate per 100 million aircraft-miles: 0.117 (2013)

The 10 year averages for both of those respectively are 1.254 and 0.189.

What's your point? These numbers agree with me.

If you're still arguing that airlines would still be 100x (or 10x) safer in the face of monthly fatal crashes, these numbers do not support that at all.

If you're merely arguing that airlines as they actually are today are 10x safer than driving, that is clearly true and a vast understatement, but I never said otherwise.

There are essentially 0 non-fatal injuries in major commercial air travel. Add in the (hundreds of thousands?) of auto-related injuries and even in the scenario described, air travel is easily 100x safer.

They said that if a full airliner were lost each month it would still be 100x safer. That is completely untrue.

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