The FAA will never allow "flightsharing" on the commercialism that Uber is at. It's simply too dangerous.
There are lots of people who have no problem doing dangerous things or even love it (say, dangerous sports). If they are cleared up about the risks involved I openly support allowing people to do dangerous things if they love to.
Even if that risk is flying a large object in the sky at high speeds?
edit: I'm referring to the danger of adding a passenger to an already scheduled flight by a private pilot, which is what I thought this flytenow service was about. (Assuming there's not a weight issue and someone isn't trying to intentionally crash the plane...)
Private pilot licenses have much lower standards than commercial operations. Commercial has tighter maintenance and training requirements, and is consequently much more expensive to run.
Until around the 1960s to 1970s, air travel was very very dangerous. People died quite regularly. It was the implementation of serious safety practices and regulations that changed the risk to be safer than riding in a car, and public perception. Since aviation makes the country go, and people have an innate fear of flying, the FFA is both concerned for the increased loss of human life and the loss of trust in flying that would translate to the commercial sector if this went through.
Adding humans to these existing flights does not make them more dangerous, but creating more private charter flights may very well be more dangerous. There is some good data linked above that indicates they are equally dangerous.
YMMV I guess.
At takeoff time, weather around the CT coast looks iffy. Jim would rather stay home and see his sister next weekend instead. Jeff can't get a flight on such short order, and tells Jim he really needs to make the meeting or a big contract is lost. He offers to pay Jim 2x the full flight costs to make his meeting.
What Jim will do in this situation is likely very different than if he hadn't agreed to take Jeff along.
Commercial Aviation (per 100,000 flight hours): 0.022
General Aviation (per 100,000 flight hours): 1.11
Motor Vehicle: (per 100 million miles): 1.5
1: http://enhs.umn.edu/current/injuryprevent/aviation/magnitude...
From the same table the overall risk of death (Fatality Rate) is the same for both forms of flying:
Fatality Rate (Commercial Aviation): 1.9
Fatality Rate (General Aviation): 1.91
In other words - and to make it really simple - if you are given the choice of going with a commercial carrier or with a general aviation craft to the same destination in a single flight then you would do wise to take the commercial carrier.
Here's the thing: we don't care about the number of crashed airplanes, we care about crashed people (the number of deaths). And the number of deaths is about the same per passenger mile flown.
Passengers are no safer in either form of flying, according to this source.
Let's break this into two specific questions (assuming the source is correct):
1) How likely is it that a specific flight will crash?
Answer: it's more likely that a private flight will crash than a commercial flight.
2) How likely is it that I will die on a private vs commercial flight?
Answer: your likelihood of dying is the roughly the same for both private and commercial flights.
I might be wrong, but this is indeed what I am arguing, and I think 'jacquesm' is saying the same. 'nostromo' says your likelihood of dying is the roughly the same for both private and commercial flights, and I don't think this is true if the metric is getting from point A to point B without dying.
If my memory of previous research is correct, a passenger on a private plane has approximately the same risk per mile travelled as a passenger on a motorcycle[1], which is something much greater than the risk per passenger mile of a normal automobile, which is in turn something significantly riskier than traveling the same number of miles by a commercial jet.[2]
We're arguing that the thing you should care about is whether the specific flight that you are on will crash, which has a significantly higher likelihood in general aviation.
Yes, each flight you take in a private plane is significantly more likely to end in a crash than each flight you take on a commercial airline. Your chances of being killed if the plane is involved in an accident are greater in a private plane (fatalities per accident are greater on the commercial flight, but risk to each passenger is lower). Therefore, your chances of dying per flight taken are greater in private flight than in commercial aviation. Is this the same as what you are saying?
[1] Edit: Found a seeming good source at http://www.nianet.org/ODM/presentations/Overview%20SVO%20Ken..., page 8. Looks like I was slightly wrong to say that motorcycles and GA are comparable risks. If we trust their estimates, motorcycles are about 2x more dangerous per hour than GA, and 3x more dangerous per mile.
[2] I put the specific numbers from in my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781106
From an individual stand-point, you are correct: "will my flight crash?" is a question that the individual would ask. But from a regulatory stand-point, the question is, "what is the safest way to transport people?" and those questions are not the same statistically.
This is similar to Taleb's "black swans" conundrum. You're comparing likely events with small ramifications to unlikely events with large ramifications.
And the number of deaths is about the same per passenger mile flown.
Deaths per passenger mile is indeed the relevant metric, but this is not the number which is equal. Instead, the deaths per airplane mile are about equal. Since the commercial flights tend to have many more passengers, the passenger miles denominator will be greater by this ratio.
From a passenger's perspective, commercial flights are thus safer than private planes by this same ratio. I don't think the linked article gives enough information to calculate the ratio of passenger miles for GA and commercial, but 50x seems like it would be in the ballpark.
Commercial Aviation (per 100,000 flight hours): 0.022
General Aviation (per 100,000 flight hours): 1.11
Motor Vehicle: (per 100,000 driving hours): 0.075
Mojo Nixon — You Gotta Be Insane To Fly In Small Private Planes
http://redmp3.cc/1334534/mojo-nixon-you-gotta-be-insane-to-f...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-15/more-peopl...
Also:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/17/opinion/The-Dangers-of-Pri...
"""The National Transportation Safety Board found that in 2011, 94 percent of fatal aviation accidents occurred in what’s called general aviation. That category includes private small planes flown by amateurs as well as professionally piloted corporate flights in high-powered aircraft, such as the Gulfstream IV jet that crashed in May in Bedford, Mass., killing all seven people on board. By contrast, commercial aviation had no fatal accidents that year. Statistics from the N.T.S.B. show that general aviation aircraft average nearly seven accidents per 100,000 flight hours, compared with an average of 0.16 accidents per 100,000 hours for commercial airlines. """
Sauce straight from the horse' mouth:
http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/data/Pages/AviationDataSt...
It is actually 100x more dangerous than commercial aviation. Is that what you meant by "showing me the danger"?
This chart gives (among other things) fatalities per passenger mile for 2005-2012 as a multiplier of the per passenger risk of death when traveling by automobile.
Passenger auto: 1x
Commercial Airline: .006x
Motorcycle: 40.2x
General Aviation: 12.0x
Of course, all else is not necessarily equal. A daytime motorcycle ride in full gear in good weather is definitely safer than an unexpected night flight in the fog with a low hour private pilot. A trip on a well-maintained corporate jet with an experienced pilot is almost certainly safer than snowy roads in a rear-wheel drive automatic. And of course, statistics don't answer the question of what should and should not be acceptable risks.