You know the FAA makes more rules every year to make flying safer for passengers. 

Airlines have to comply and pass this cost on to customers. 

Flying gets so expensive that customers opt to drive. 

Driving is way more deadly than flying 

FAA regulations kill more people than they save.

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I’m glad we’re getting more technically proficient at flight

But

There should be more plane crashes

“We avoided one aviation death” is not necessarily a good compensation for “tens of thousands of people had their lives materially depleted by a lack of access to economical, fun, life-enhancing air travel.”

Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we all have some instinctual horror of flight that short circuits our rational thinking if we let it 

You’ve probably heard about the Air India crash but did you also hear about the Tanzanian bus crash? No, because a story about an automobile accident doesn’t hijack your brain in a way that sells ads. 

Not to mention that all road accidents amount to less than 10% of cardiovascular related deaths. Aviation deaths don’t even register. Accepting the free Coca-Cola on a plane ride probably increases the risk of the plane ride by an order of magnitude 

We are leaving massive amounts of value on the table by rounding up the value of each human life to infinity in many contexts, but nowhere more than in the aviation context 

These marginal increases to safety don’t come for free. Making people happier and richer is as noble a goal as preventing senseless deaths. The increased safety comes with a real opportunity cost 

We should be willing to accept more plane crashes, despite the increase in tragic deaths, because the net societal benefits to health, wealth, and happiness would compensate us for the deaths many times over 

It doesn’t scale indefinitely, and I’m not saying we should get sloppy about something as consequential as flight. My assertion is that we are deep into the land of diminishing returns but we keep irrationally forgoing huge benefits in exchange for proportionally negligible benefits of increased safety

Boy do I. 

Seriously @ericolsz we gotta find a way to work together

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I mean, the FDA is the murderous cabal to have your cross hairs set on

Boy do I. 

Seriously @ericolsz we gotta find a way to work together 

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Yeah that’s a bit of a hot take. The structural cost of flying has fallen by 50% in the last 30 years, in real terms. Flying used to be a luxury, now it’s widely affordable and we have the deregulation and the emergence of low-cost carriers to thank.

And the more people that fly (historically, 2x every 15–20 years), the more the aviation industry is able to spread its huge fixed costs onto more ticketed seats, which means the unit cost per seat (CASK) goes down.

So already the premise that flying is getting “so expensive” is misguided. There’s been a bit of a hike in airfares lately, but that’s not due to the FAA, it’s due to the fact that the OEMs cannot deliver enough aircraft to meet the demand (the order backlog at Airbus and Boeing is on the order of 11 to 12 years…). Load factors are through the roof, so basic supply and demand imbalance means airfare are up.

This is true globally, by the way. The FAA only has sovereignty over 4% of the world’s population, so it’s not like we don’t have a large control group to look at.

And frankly the additional regulations put out by the FAA are pretty light. Some (related to international flights) are required by ICAO under the Chicago Convention, to which the US is a party, so the FAA and every other CAA in the world just complies. Others are just airworthiness directives that address mechanical and safety concerns for specific aircraft, so they’re needed (imagine not grounding an aircraft for a known problem and an accident happens — that would convince more people to drive!).

awaiting commentary on this by @aviationdoctor.eth