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.