Based on Google numbers:

There’s 16M flights per year, so saving 5 minutes each is 80M minutes, which corresponds to 160 years.

A plane crash will kill about 160 people; so if one happens every twenty years, then we’ll have saved lives if the average age is over 50 (within 20 years of natural death) and lost lives otherwise.

Personally, seems a bad gamble.

To get from minutes of time to minutes of human time, you have to multiply the 5 minutes by the number of passengers on the flight

I don't have an opinion one way or the other on the "optimization", just pointing out the missing step in the math

I'm not sure a one to one comparison here is appropriate, either. The fundamental argument that 1 minute of wasted time is equivalent to 1 minute of life seems tricky. To prove this is easy, simply ask yourself if you'd rather take a day off your life or spend a day waiting in line at the DMV. I think you'll find that most people would rather still be alive and at the DMV. Loss of life is not equivalent to loss of time.

It is the same thing. Life is finite. You will live every minute, but you better not waste most of them. Last thing you want is to run out of time and not done the things you wanted.

Say I offer to stand in line for you at the DMV and do all your paperwork that otherwise would have taken a day of your life, but in exchange at some point in the future, 1 day from your otherwise natural death, I will find you and shoot you in the head. say I have the resources to absolutely do this and there's no way to avoid it.

Do you take that deal? Why or why not?

Yes. Chances are high my natural death will occur at old age. One day today is worth more than one day as an old man.

What you’re suggesting is any crash can be attributed to the US method of scheduling takeoff and landing (since that’s the risk issue you’re responding to). That’s not true. If a plane’s engine explodes in midair, it has nothing to do with how the ATC schedules takeoff and landing.

I couldn’t find any crashes listed on Wikipedia in the past 20 years that could be attributed to two planes being directed occupy a runway at the same time.

I remember when my grandfather and I were arguing about whether or not SNES or Sega Genesis was better(he worked for Motorola who made the Sega Genesis processor). Eventually we agreed that whichever one had more buttons on its controller was the superior product, so I won that discussion. Actually I think he was just ready to end the argument but I thought my logic was sound.

If time is our most precious resource, then build more runways. The problem is that they cost more money to build and more money to operate. So we go back to

>> It sounds to me like far too many critical safety decisions are being made with an eye on money rather than safety.

Money is not the only problem at most locations

Major Airports are often locked in to the Physical foot print either due to Geography or other factors. Sure you can just "move the airpoirt" but then you have the NIMBY problem where everyone wants an airport close by, but never near by....

And if you want to simplistically run it all down to "money" well at that point everything in a money problem, so for like NYC they could turn spend billions or Trillions to turn midtown into a big airport but that seem rather unrealistic.

This narrative that came out of COVID of "if it saves just one life" is a bit ridiculous imo, and not at all practical

At some point, you can build a new airport that is basically hell and gone from the city it serves--such as DIA outside Denver, which had all sorts of problems getting going. But you can't really materially expand close-in airports. And in case anyone thinks this is a uniquely American problem, how long did it take Germany to build a new Berlin airport again?

Your eye must necessarily be on both money and safety. If you look at only one, you will only make nonsensical decisions.

I don't know the analysis for the multiple clearance on runways on the US (honestly, it's the first time I hear about it). What I know is that the US has many complex risk analysis that my country (3rd largest aviation area on the world, after the US and EU) doesn't have enough data to replicate. That leads to plenty of policies that we can't actually understand the reasoning.

It takes people's time to build runways. That's time they won't be building other valuable things.

You're ignoring the core truth of the comment you're replying to: Scarcity exists. There is no way to have it all; there are only compromises. Simply walking is dangerous because you could fall. We could all go back to being infants* crawling on the floor if we wanted to be safer. But we won't. Making more compromises in the name of safety has to be justified. Planes will never be perfectly safe. That is okay.

You’ll likely still have to spend that time after the horrific accident.

Also, I would disagree that engineering time is more valuable than human life. Engineering time should be spent on safeguarding human life. Otherwise, what are we even doing?