The Safety cost and even the hull cost is simply not a major contributor to the cost of your ticket. It’s mostly fuel gate fees maintenance and overhead

Where do you think the maintenance fees come from? That's in part a safety cost.

Keep in mind, if you compromise maintenance for costs, you'll make up the costs in crew wages as they obviously have 1-2 orders of magnitude more risk exposure than the average passenger and won't be willing to fly for anything less than massive hazard pay.

Scheduled maintenance is done with semi slave labor in the 3rd world. Routine is more expense local labor but the routine stuff can’t be deferred anyway

Fuel as well!

"this isn't enough fuel to get more than 80% of the way there!"

"you don't need fuel for the descent though"

> And you could certainly make the same argument about airliners, which have a death rate <10% that of trains (and <1% that of cars).

You can, but it's not a fair comparison. 99.9% of deaths of railroad transport is people killed while crossing rails - e.g. pedestrians.

If you consider rail passengers only, it is far lower than airlines and cars, something on the scale of 2-3 people/year.

Airplanes are cheating in the sense that there are no pedestrians in the air to collide with.

I mean, not _zero_[0]... but close enough, really.

0: https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/air-safety-institut...

Wow.. And if you asked me to predict the outcome of that incident, I'd have said the fatalities would have been the other way around... go figure!

Haha, ok, I stand corrected.

Interesting stat.

Airliners are much safer than other modes of transportation per mile traveled. The difference vanishes (mostly, or reverses) when interpreted per mile on the vehicle or per trip.

If airliners were only as safe as walking, nobody would use them, because you'd expect to have at least a minor accident (like a sprained ankle) when walking 2000 miles. A similar argument can be made for cars and trains (just a magnitude less distance per trip and consequently a smaller chance of injury).

It's a novel idea in terms of emissions avoidance, though: couple the externalities to personal risk.

People who currently are forced to commute daily with cars could be much safer doing so on a more robust train system. You wouldn’t get the same benefit from cheaper flights.

Did we both interpret the MCAS incident with Boeing differently? Because I saw this as regulatory capture putting it's metaphorical testicles where it felt comfortable.