How would you even know? Saying "I'd pay more for a safer routing" is rather reminiscent of Steve Yegge's Shit's Easy Syndrome - you say you want a safer routing, but what does that mean?

You'd pay an extra ten percent on your ticket to fly ten percent lower? What about other factors - would you demand more reinforcements on the wings of the planes you fly on? How about longer flight times due to having to stop for fuel? What about how this would impact global route scheduling?

I could keep going with that, but the bottom line is that you don't understand what makes a plane safe. I don't understand what makes a plane safe. Few people - unless they're Airbus or Boeing design engineers - on this site know what makes a plane safer, and how much that would cost.

Airlines have a huge interest in making their flights safe - think off all the shitty PR that Air France (one of the world's most respected airlines) and Airbus (one of two real manufacturers of jumbo jets) are getting, and how much it will directly and indirectly cost them. The last people died on an American airline was in February. Before that, it was in August 2006. The last time an American jumbo jet crashed and killed people was in 2001. Flying is an incredibly safe way to get from point A to point B - but like everything, there are some times when nature throws us a curveball, and we get hit by it.

>> So I'd settle for a government mandate of how high commercial airlines can fly.

I wouldn't trust Congress to determine how high an airline can fly. If I want to know how high an Airbus can safely fly, I'd ask Airbus - they know the planes better than anyone, and have a huge vested in interest in keeping them safe.

But in general, when flying it's safer to be higher and faster. By far the most dangerous thing you might encounter when flying is the ground...

For conditions like the ones that the Air France flight was going through, this would seem prudent. You can't fly above thunderheads like that. Might as well get yourself into a safer part of the flight envelope in case something bad happens.

Agreed. Now if the captain Sully (the guy who landed in the Hudson) says flying out of the coffin corer is safer would you believe him?

Airlines have a huge interest in making their flights safe

Yes, they also have a huge interest in being profitable, they are trying to optimize both.

There's nothing wrong with that, but as a consumer I'd like a bit more choice.

But as other in this thread have pointed out the particular nature of the airline business makes it impossible for that kind of market differentiation to happen. That's known as a market failure.

Hence my desire for a government mandate.

Alternatively, do you think we need any of the current government regulations on airlines?

I would assume HN would favor people who looked beyond knee jerk responces. Just because you like to use the free market when it's possible does not mean you need to apply it in all cases.

I really do want the market to work, but I know in reality it very often does not work at all. Most often with big industries where the startup costs are high.

Do you prefer to continue to fly in a needle's eye rather then have the government step in?

Ideally at least one airline would offer the safer option as a way to gain customers, but what if no one does?

Is your libertarianism that pure? If so, that's admirable, I guess my ideals are just not quite as strong.

Furthermore, the first time such a company did have a fatal or obviously dangerous incident, they'd go insolvent immediately. I see the point you're trying to make but it's simply impractical in a mass market like commodity air travel. Uber-expensive executive flying, perhaps.

If it wasn't for the coverage of this incident, I would never have known of the "coffin corner." How would market forces operate on factors of which the public is not even aware?

Like say you design software for something critical like medical devices, and one of these fails and somebody famous dies or a bunch of people die in different places. Suddenly everyone is talking about unit testing and software verification as it pertains to your field, someone with a talent marketing starts up safercoding.com and so on. I'm not sure the stock of human knowledge has really gone up.

And when I got my CS degree we specifically studied accidents where bad software in medical devices killed people. I recall an X-ray machine where the hardware was upgraded and a bunch of software assumptions about when the fuses would blow became wrong. That ended up killing people.

And as someone who has written software for medical instruments I can tell you unit test coverage is part of the contracts we sign.

The coffin corner only played a small part in the accident but that's how accidents always happen. It's always several small things that go wrong together.

A safe airline would not flaunt its safety record, but it's safety practice. Not flying the coffin corner would remove that one part that can go wrong from any future accident scenario.

The safe airline having an accident would not automatically bankrupt it, every other airline has had accident and this one would continue with its safer then average practices.

However, I agree with you this will never happen because as you say the airlines are a crap commodity business. Even Warren Buffet has mentioned how bad a business airlines are for investors.

That's why even though I consider myself a libertarian I want a government mandate to stay out of the coffin corner.

We already have much more complex and difficult to enforce regulations on airlines, this one is simple and would be easy to enforce as we already track all planes on rader closely all of the time.

Is the barrier actually high? (I see new airlines every so often.)

What are the actual barriers? If they're govt, why isn't reducing the barriers the right response?

> So I'd settle for a government mandate of how high commercial airlines can fly.

And govt would get it right because that's what they do.

Didn't we just have a nice discussion of regulatory capture? (My favorite comment was by someone who thought that regulatory capture was the act of promotiing govt power grabs.)

Besides the obvious cost of acquiring multi-million dollar jetliners (which, if bought new, typically have to be ordered 5-10 years in advance of delivery) and signing leases for gate space and hiring ground crew at airports and so on?

You also need FAA and TSA approved operations plans, adding for instance the cost of screening all your employees and equipping your planes with things like black boxes and weather radar.

Then you end up like Virgin America, who can't fly to Chicago because the incumbent carriers there claim there are no available gates at O'Hare (despite the number of flights in and out of the airport being down like 10-20% from previous peak).

Doesn't seem that high to me...

One webpage I found suggests the lease price for a 737 is between $50,000 - $100,000 per month (which seems reasonable, or maybe a little low). Wikipedia says YouTube's bandwidth costs are estimated at $1M per day, so the hardware cost of a couple aircraft doesn't seem all that expensive.

(Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about commercial aviation.)