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Comment by ATsch | Hacker News Reader

This kind of reminds me of the dril quote:

> drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,

https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762

Point being, just that something has some upsides does not mean that it is a good thing overall. I personally believe that if flying millions of people across the globe is truly impossible without reckless exploitation of people and resources, we should rather not do that, no matter what the benefits of that would be.

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> no matter what the benefits would be

This is illogical reasoning. We should look at the cost/benefit tradeoff. Looking only at costs or only at benefits will not yield the best decision.

We need to draw a line somewhere between safety & cost. I'd argue it is always possible to make something safer if you are willing to accept higher cost. Expensive plane tickets have negative externalities, and for some, does cost lives (inability to get treatments for ex.).

> inability to get treatments for ex.

I don't think that is a good example. If the treatment you need requires you to fly, that means it a very complicated diseases, or a rare disease that only a few centers treat. In any case, it is likely that the care is very resource intensive and is either expensive or heavily subsidized. In those cases, even if the airfare were doubled or tripled, it would not be the limiting factor in treatment.

I'm not saying it necessarily applies for life-saving treatments AFAIK, but not everyone agrees on what medical care is. For example, in the U.S. it has been shown that state abortion restrictions hit the lower-income segment much harder precisely because they cannot afford to travel to states which have more liberal laws concerning abortion.

Or the cost of flying and getting surgery abroad is far cheaper than doing it at home, with minimal additional risk.

It is common enough that there is an entire organization (Angel Flight) dedicated to it. Using private planes and private pilots which are significantly less safe than commercial.

Another example is family members overseas. Many have to choose between providing for their family vs. being with their family. Affordability of flights can have a huge impact on their quality of life and ability to take part in the moments that many of use take for-granted.

This is partially self-inflicted. Cheap air travel incentivizes more people to move overseas because they know their families are just a flight away. I once knew a person that lived and worked in the UK, but studied in Poland - she flew back and forth twice a month(!). I guess it would be fine, if not for the environmental costs.

Anyway, I have this feeling that you could justify just about anything if you dig for nth-order effects, but it doesn't change the fundamental point: a race to the bottom sacrifices everything that can be sacrifices. Environment is usually the first victim, quality the second, but safety trade-offs are eventually made too. At some point in a product category's lifecycle, one starts to wonder whether it's so degraded that it would be better if it didn't exist anymore.

And n-th order effects and externalities are specifically excluded from corporate accounting.

Which means we don't know how much these things actually cost in real terms. We also don't know how to quantify potential benefits.

(And if someone says 'Well, that's subjective' - so is nominal market value.)

There's conventional profit-loss accounting, and there's everything else. It seems the everything else can accumulate to ecosystem-threatening levels, and conventional accounting will continue to pretend this is financially irrelevant.

It doesn't have to be a rare disease—it can just mean that non-basic healthcare is hard to access.

Example: I live in the Philippines. Its healthcare system is affected by two things: centralization and the fact that the country is an archipelago.

Most quality health care is happening in Metro Manila. What you find outside is generally very basic, and even in 2nd-tier cities like Cebu or Davao they may refer you to Manila for something you'd think they ought be able to do.

With travel by boat being … rather slow, with vacation time not exactly ample, and the average salary being low I'm quite certain that affordable flights ($25 Cebu - Manila) are making ample difference in terms of what kind of healthcare situations are being addressed.

So healthcare would have been better in the outer regions without cheap air travel?

Who is flying commercial to get treated for life-threatening emergencies?

Think life-threatening non-emergencies.

If travel is necessary for medical treatment, it ought to be covered by insurance, so the price shouldn't matter. Medevac flights, aka air ambulances, are a thing.

"covered by insurance" doesn't mean much if you're still billed $10k or more after insurance.

My father has decent insurance as a retiree and still got billed for an ambulance ride after he had complications following a jaw surgery.

I've seen a bunch of anecdotal stories about how it's cheaper for someone on the west coast to fly to Korea, or down to Mexico, for non-critical surgeries, spend a week recovering, and then fly home.

I think it's a fair assumption that the US healthcare system would have been overhauled long before the complete elimination of the competitive market for commercial air travel, which is what this thread is about.

Not to underestimate that cheap far distance travel probably decreases the probability of big wars by a reasonable amount.

How do we factor in 9/11 here?

The discussion here is about more or less expensive air travel, within reasonable multiples. Al Qaeda would’ve probably been able to justify and afford 10x what it paid for its airfare so that’s mostly a matter of passenger air travel existing in the first place.

The first attack on WTC was a truck bomb which almost succeeded.

(Oh no!) If the truck almost hit, the airplane actually hit.

(Oh yeah!) If the WTC was standing maybe oil would be cheaper.

(Oh no!) But, if oil were cheaper, we would be that much further away from adopting alternate energy sources like solar.

Reminds me of the quote (forget the source) -

Nothing is bad. Nothing is good. Everything just is.

If flying were very expensive for consumers, it would probably be a lot more expensive for the military too. Civilian aviation probably provides a lot of R&D that is used in military planes.

“We need to draw a line somewhere between safety & cost.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jltnBOrCB7I

Indeed. This is not an accident.

But memories are short and greed is long, and those who “forget” that every safety reg was written in the blood of others can sleep easy beneath golden parachutes and very good lawyers.

Honestly, best thing Boeing could do now is rename it the “737 MAX Fight Club Pinto”, fill it with all the incels who didn’t get the joke, and fly the whole crapload off into the great unknown.

In my opinion, Milton is right in that clip. Everyone agrees that we need to draw the line somewhere, define some level of safety as 'good enough'. IE flying is more dangerous in IFR conditions, so we could ban all commercial flights during those conditions. However that line is not the same for everyone. Most people are fine with accepting the slightly higher risk involved in flying during low visibility.

Risk tolerances are different, so why do we try to regulate to a given standard. It makes little sense to allow motorcycles yet have a regulation that requires the use of seatbelts in cars. Instead, I'd like to see regulations that enforce testing and information sharing. After that, let people decide which airline to take, which car to buy, and therefore where to draw that line.

Isn’t this just another case of perfect being the enemy of good? If flying for a couple of hours is already safer than driving for 10, but we don’t want flying without a perfect safety record (making it much less accessible via much higher ticket prices)...then are we simply doomed? Instead of 99.95% reliability, do we really spend 10x more to get to 99.995%?

Drunk driving is low hanging fruit: it is really bad and easy to get rid of without great cost to society. It is incomparable to what is going on in the aviation industry.

I think the difference is psychological: you are in control of your car and you feel safer because of it. A plane gives you no control so you want more guarantees.

Als: Planes add another dimension of things which can go wrong so maybe that is also involved.

It’s a matter of scale.

Driver crashes a car, kills a few. Personal liability, local reporting. Rest of world rolls on.

Airliner crashes, kills hundreds. Global headlines. Massive corporate responsibility. Very bad for business; just ask PanAm.

Except, air travel has gotten cheaper, and safer.

Here's hoping we didn't hit a local maximum.

Seems very unlikely for safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#/media/File:Fa...

Cost, who knows.

In the US some years we literally have more people die by falling out of bed than in accidents on regular airline flights.

Everyone in the US has to get in and out of bed every day, usually in a groggy state. I get the angle, but it's not really a fair comparison.

How many of those were healthy people under 80?

The inverse is also true though. Just because something had downsides doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing overall.

Air travel had gotten much better by pretty much all measures, including safety.

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