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Comment by mipnix | Hacker News Reader

FWIW. I never met someone, who worked for the FAA, who couldn't end my career because they were having a bad day. Pilots feel about FAA officials the way they feel about doctors.

That said, the FAA is the best and safest organization in the world, when it comes to doing what they do. It is bureaucratic, bloated and byzantine and I would take them over any other institution on this side of the Milky Way, any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Part of the problem is, everyone wants cheap tickets AND the best service. One of my advisors had a sign outside his door. It read: Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick any two.

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Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick any two.

That's a big part of it. The other part is the picking. How can I, or the average person, judge the efficacy of safety protocols? I'm sure there are plenty of well-meaning people who invest enormous effort into precautions that are completely invisible to me. But I also know that the cheapest form of employment insurance is being visibly indispensable, which would tend to subsidize highly visible actions regardless of efficacy.

Then you can factor in moral hazard; people take more risks if they feel more safe. This means that if something increases safety, but less than you'd imagine, mandating it can increase danger. e.g. if drivers thought that seatblets made them 99% less likely to die, when the real number was 10%, you'd naturally expect more fatal accidents with more people driving as if their risk of death had dropped by two orders of magnitude.

The beauty of it, as far as the FAA goes, lies in the fact the public is not involved in the safety standards.

There is plenty of window dressing in what the travel industry does. A large part of it is because people want to see something being done. It makes them feel better. No matter how small or inconvenient.

The real safety measures are what we don't see or hear about. Every accident that doesn't happen is not JUST luck. It is the end result of a well thought out and executed process.

Is there room for improvement? Of course. But it beats anything else out there by open lengths.

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