Which is one of the reasons the FAA exists. It's probably not the best idea to let airline safety get sorted out by market forces.

If market forces increased the number of deaths from air travel by .5% for 10% off ticket prices, I don't think that would necessarily be a bad thing. There's value in cheaper travel, and it might even be value that saves a life -- granted, the kid in Africa who died this morning of starvation because his mother is unemployed because his country is not a tourist destination because it costs too much to go there did not die in a photo-friendly fireball, but is his death any less meaningful?

LOTS of very useful things will kill far more people this year than commercial air travel. Water buckets. Bicycles. Doctors. Cars, in about the first two hours of the year.

(If you took a Boeing 747 full of American patients to a doctor's office, more than one would die due to medical error. Remember that checklists article from yesterday?)

Air travel gets the evil eye because the deaths are very visible. The same factor would make market-regulated air travel very safe.

Bonus points for explaining how market forces would encourage surgeons to use checklists.

"This is your malpractice insurance company. We just read an interesting article in the newspaper about how using checklists cuts fatalities by 50%. So we checked our data, and found this is accurate. Great news!

If you don't use checklists, your premium next year will triple."

Cool. Now, what are the pitfalls?

Note that the parent comment to yours mentioned an example where letting the market sort out airline safety works. Your comment suggests that you believe people should be forced by the FAA to travel on lower cost airlines even if they would avoid them due to poor safety reputation. I assume, instead, that you're implicitly excluding any non-price information from "market forces" even when people are making decisions based on it, but that's incorrect.

I've read it several times and I think you might be right that it's trying. But if that's the point that it tries to make, then it's simply wrong. I assumed that the comment at the end was a counterbalance.

There's a tipping point for "dangerous airline". 0.5% more dangerous than any of the current airlines wouldn't be noticeably less safe (i.e. 20 vs. 21 crashes for an airline) and if they were competing on costs, the cheaper one would win. And if somehow one airline, despite only a 0.5% difference in safety gap did get branded that way and the rules remained the same, there'd be a market gap in there for a new airline with the same bad standards to come in and fill.

0.5% is 200 vs 201, not 20 vs 21 (that would be 5%).

All an individual cares about is 1 vs 0 crashes-per-flight, not 200 vs 201 crashes per bajillion flights. So if I could buy a ticket on Qantas (0 fatalities in their entire jet era) or Aeroflot (31 in the last 19 years, including 2 unrelated on the same day from the same airport) for the same trip, I'll clearly take Qantas, even if the Qantas flight is 3x as expensive, as I assume most people would.

But here's where humans don't do math well comes in. Even a tiny difference in actual safety is dramatically over-valued. "No child of mine is going to be subjected to an extra 0.5% risk just to see some big mouse in Florida! I'd sooner drive there than fly THAT airline!" And that is how airlines with a bad reputation for safety end up merging, getting bought, shutting down or simply changing names. And how people who can't rationally make decisions end up driving 800 miles to Disney instead of flying, because the risks of driving are much less visible to them.

Hmm, we're operating with opposite assumptions then. The only reason that I remember that Qantas has had zero crashes is that it was on Rainman when his brother couldn't believe how stubborn he was being. Other than that, I'd honestly be more likely to make a choice based on a $50 difference and if I remember how good the food on a given carrier is and how long the checkin lines are.

This might be less true of those who don't fly often for whom it's a big deal, but I'd guesstimate business travelers care less.

That's because you can make rational judgments about what's important to you, and have a feel for the insignificance of 0.5% delta in accident rate. (IOW, I agree with you, but I don't think that most airline ticket purchasers agree with either of us.)

If you say to Joe Public "this airline is 0.5% more likely to have a crash than the one that's $50 less; which one do you want your family to fly?", I doubt many people can easily say "Oh, the cheaper one is preferable." They may arrive there after some agony, but to instinctively know that an extra 1 in 200 on something that's already 1 in 3 million or so is not economically justified on an EV basis. (You'd have to value your life at $30 billion dollars for there to be an EV equivalence between those two choices.)

Nonetheless, I predict many more people would find ease in deciding to take "the safer, more expensive airline" than would find ease in taking "the less safe, but cheaper airline" for their family travel.