The Risk of Too Much Air Safety Regulation (2020) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Risk of Too Much Air Safety Regulation (2020) [pdf]

cato.org

This is great! I feel the same way about traffic regulation. I don't mean seatbelts, I mean stop signs and stop lights. Our yeoman drivers are best positioned to make the determination about stopping or proceeding themselves. Bureaucrats in Washington are too far away to make this important decision for every driver. It's best left to individuals to make the decision about personal safety themselves.

More seriously, you'll note that none of the charts have numbers. They're all more-or-less standard economics demand curves, except for Figure 3, which is a kind of "Laffer Curve" for "net lives saved". Table 1, which is a bunch of numbers, is for things that are (or have been in the past) collected by the FAA or NHTSA, some federal agency.

This is just ideologically driven application of junior-year economics, plus a mystical belief in "Laffer Curve" type cost/benefit analyses.

We all know (even though we haven't internalized) that airplanes are so much safer compared to other means of transportation, I'd guess that planes are safer than any other space a human can occupy including an hospital.

The goal of a human should be not to die, not avoiding death from aviation, the fixation to hammer on this industry happens because people are intuitively scared of it and the physics is not sufficient to have them stay calm because they ignore the concept of lift , propulsion etc. etc.

And also because of bad memories from the past which have nothing to do with planes, more like with the lack of a couple of Law Enforcement agents on board.

It occur to me that the shape of that Laffer-like curve is important to all this, and without numbers (which aren't present in concocting that curve, only in Table 1, which doen't allow you to reconstruct the curve), you can't say that adding regulation, or decreasing regulation will cost or save lives. As drawn, the curve looks parabolic to my eye, but maybe once you work out the numbers, it's quite a flat parabola. Adding more regulation might not change thing much. Removing regulation might not, either. If it's not a parabola, or bell curve of some kind, what shape is it? which side of the curve are we on?

That is to say, upon reflection, this article is dumber than I thought. It's pure propaganda.

I didn't post this thing to discuss about the merits of the Laffer curve etc. as a matter of fact I didn't even read it.

We all know that airplane travel is the safest means of transportation and that a plane is among the safest space a human can occupy period.

Intuitively we all know that deaths could be reduced elsewhere in society (not necessarily transportation) by taking some IQ brain power and computing power that is in heavy needed to reach the 5th 9 after the comma to make planes 99,99999% safe and diverting elsewhere

Geez man zoom out

is as a matter of fact I didn't even read it.

You're reaping what you sowed. The article is propaganda, and can be dismissed as such because it uses the trappings of economics, but not the numbers, to try to justify a solely ideological point. That is, they're lying. Since this is from the Libertarian Cato Institute, I guess we knew that anyway. Don't know what I expected from them.

The article is the first thing that showed up on Google and wasn't too keen on browsing the obscure substacks

So now that we got that out of the way, please stop acting robotic and give me your intuition on the topic not the one of the guy who has to win an argument against CATO

I used to be a stress analyst at aerospace companies. Like every cog in that kind of big machine, I had almost no effect on the result. I did some very preliminary analysis on the candidate airframe that became the MD-11. My intuition is that Cato is wrong on this point. Spending less on air safety would make the currently-conspiratorial US public afraid of flying, particularly if 2 more 737-MAX type incidents happened. Air travel would drop off drastically, and all the travel that was worth it, would be done by automobile.

Mass transit airplanes are absolutely not buses or cars, or even trains. There's very, very few of them made. There are only 2 ways to get to safe quality machines. One is by statistical methods and constant incremental improvement, like Toyota, and to a lesser extent, other car companies do. This requires a lot of production, and a culture of feedback from in the field to the designers to the factory.

The second is to have high standards and inspect, verify and qualify everything. Since transport aircraft production is so low, there's really no possibility for feedback like Toyota or Honda uses. We're stuck with regulation, or we don't have an air travel system.

Did you read this far, or were you "not too keen" on finishing a longer post?

I did read it and I still think that planes killing 0 people in a good year on a global basis means that such effort is subtracted from other parts of society which ultimately plays so loose that kills people in droves.

Just to mention the TSA you have to face in airports vs. absolutely fuck all lack of security while boarding trains and subway trains where you could be carrying a nuke or an AK47 in your suitcase and nobody checks a damn thing nor the ID etc.

Plus the train arrives right in the city center where an ill intentioned individual could do maximum damage

But not limiting to transportation means just observing how loose is safety in our cities where death is always around the corner (from accidental kinetic impact or human assault)

> > One is by statistical methods and constant incremental improvement,

It's the only game in town. We did that for ships, trains, automobiles and yes even planes, they aren't special.

The lessons learned won't disappear.

> > Spending less on air safety would make the currently-conspiratorial US public afraid of flying, particularly if 2 more 737-MAX type incidents happened. Air travel would drop off drastically, and all the travel that was worth it, would be done by automobile.

This is the crux of it all, it's in fact a psychological problem not factual. The same that affects nuclear reactors.

If 2 737Max go down in 2026 airplanes would still be many orders of magnitude on a casualty per mile traveled on a unit of time basis, especially when compared against automobiles.

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