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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> airlines were heavily deregulated in 1978.

With regard to the routes they could fly and the prices they could charge, yes. But they were never de-regulated with regard to the safety requirements they had to meet or the qualifications their pilots and crew and maintenance workers have to have. Those regulations have, if anything, gotten more stringent over time. And those regulations pose a huge barrier to entry for new competitors, and favor large airlines over small ones because a large airline can more easily absorb the costs of compliance.

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More to the point, foreign carriers are literally not allowed to fly US domestic routes. Plenty of international competition would love to (and foreign governments might even subsidise those flights!) but trade protection keeps them out.

It's more than just trade protection, it's a matter of national security. US airlines are legally subject to having their aircraft commandeered to transport military personnel in wartime. It wouldn't be feasible to enforce that requirement on foreign airlines.

...I don't see that as being nearly as big of a (potential) national security risk as, say, a plane from a country with much lower national standards being flown into a major hub and either accidentally or maliciously crashing into populated areas.

I'm honestly not sure how "we can't legally commandeer the plane to transport military personnel in wartime" qualifies as a national security issue. Seems more like a logistical issue in that unlikely event.

Logistical issues are national security issues. It's an insurance policy against the possibility of another large-scale war involving immediate full mobilization. Fortunately we haven't really had a war like that since WWII but the risk is still there.

Safety and security issues are handled separately. Some foreign airlines are banned from landing at any US airport because they're not trusted.

What stops you, in the event of a war, to only use the planes from domestic carriers for military purposes?

The intent of the policy is to maximize the number of airliners available from domestic carriers. They don't want domestic carriers to be driven out of business by foreign competitors.

Why not?

Also, there is no real market for airline tickets, because you can't, as a consumer, decide to resell them. So their prices are often set in very bizarre ways (leading to prices jumping around minute to minute by crazy algorithms.) I think a big part of this situation is for security purposes.

Why would preventing reselling of airline tickets promote security?

I think the idea is that tickets are tied to a real person's identity (via their passport number), you can't sell to somebody else, who might be a threat, because the airline won't let them on. Compare to, say, a car, where no one verifies that you aren't selling your car to someone without a license (or that intends to commit a terror attack, say).

>And those regulations pose a huge barrier to entry for new competitors, and favor large airlines over small ones because a large airline can more easily absorb the costs of compliance.

Have you seen the EU airline market? It's _insanely_ competitive with dozens of airlines flying everywhere, all with rigorous safety standards.

Yes but none of us want to die.

> Yes but none of us want to die.

This is the problematic false dichotomy. If you give someone a choice between "this specific set of onerous, expensive, competition-destroying regulations" or "you will be killed", they make the obvious choice.

But those aren't the only options. Existing regulations are poorly optimized. It would be possible to save the same number of lives -- more lives -- by doing more work to improve the benefit:burden ratio of regulations.

The problem is that people aren't interested in this. It's detail-oriented work that doesn't make for good sound bites, so the beneficiaries (the general public) aren't organized enough to know how to ask for it, and the organized incumbents don't want it because it would result in a larger number of viable competitors.

And it's too easy for incumbents to make the sound bites go the other way, by pretending that not spending a billion dollars to save one life is irresponsible, even though the same billion dollars could save more than a thousand lives if saved here and used beneficially somewhere else.

Could you give us an example of a specific FAA or NTSB regulation which has a suboptimal benefit:burden ratio?

> Could you give us an example of a specific FAA or NTSB regulation which has a suboptimal benefit:burden ratio?

Sure. The air traffic control system is 20th century technology that has air traffic controllers doing things manually that could be done by computers. A better automated system would have the same or better safety while requiring significantly less labor.

The FAA has been actively working to modernise the air traffic control system for decades. It's a hard problem. I fail to see how that addresses the point?

The point is that it's a hard problem whose solution yields large returns, but we're expending resources to solve it at a rate that takes decades to produce the solution.

That's true. I'm not saying the safety regulations are a bad idea. I'm just saying that they have the side effect of giving the advantage to large airlines and posing a barrier to entry for new competitors. (And that, since they are indeed regulations and have gotten more stringent over time, it is a mistake to think of the airline industry as being "deregulated" in the sense of the term "regulation" that is being used in this discussion.)

Driving is far less safe than flying, but people choose to drive all the time.

Yes, and even after 9/11 there is clear data showing that people stopped flying en masse and took the wheel instead, resulting in increased overall death count.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/05/september-11-r...

> However, Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, a German academic specialising in risk, has estimated that an extra 1,595 Americans died in car accidents in the year after the attacks – indirect victims of the tragedy.

With driving people think they are in control and that safety is determined by their own skills. When you sit in a plane you are at the mercy of the airline and the pilot. I would more compare it to buying a car. And there are a lot of safety regulations on cars. When you buy a car you know that the steering or brakes won't fail randomly.

Depends on the price.

So are you suggesting that the airlines should be allowed to use pilots that are less qualified to fly, and maintenance crew that is less qualified to maintain aircraft? Seriously?

And more safety is a bad thing... how?

Should the airline industry become more like the software eng industry, which has had such great success in producing solid and safe products?

Safety comes at a cost. If you want to makes planes ultimately safe, you would not allow them to fly, period. Just like NASA has now an objective of "safe flights" and basically does not send humans in space anymore because they can't guarantee zero fatality.

Safety is not a binary variable: it's a trade-off vs economical factors and the cost of each ticket. Since some people have to fly anyway, this means decreased spending in other areas of the economy.

But planes are ultimately safe, to the extent that the major US airlines often go a whole year with zero passenger deaths. And this safety doesn't even cost more; it's actually cheaper than the alternative when you net out all the costs.

> this safety doesn't even cost more; it's actually cheaper than the alternative when you net out all the costs.

You can't just drop an argument destroying bomb like this with no citation

They've become more stringent over time because there are more flights now, and had they not become more stringent, then we would have daily crashes and fewer people would be willing to fly.

> and had they not become more stringent, then we would have daily crashes and fewer people would be willing to fly.

Not sure you can make such a claim. There are other industries where standards and safety practices improve over time without the need of strong regulatory leadership. Case in point: occupational injuries have been decreasing over time across the board:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/osh_11082018.pdf

Occupational injuries have been decreasing over time largely due to deindustrialization. There just aren't as many people working in factories and mines any more.

And the people working in factories and mines are protected by regulation. The owners didn't improve safety voluntarily.

Which are routinely, famously flaunted by both management and labor in mining and manufacturing to increase output and thereby pay/profit.

I'd favor mechanization over 'rational human' for sure.

Also, OSHA was enacted in 1970.

Aviation has always been a mix of government regulation and industry self-interest that has worked better than all-regulation or no-regulation alone.

https://www.slideserve.com/wauna/we-need-to-continuously-imp...

There are a ton of regulations for dangerous workplaces. Without them we would still see people get killed by machines in factories or poisoned by vapors.

Except, in the west anyway, almost nobody is working in factories any more.

There are a lot of people working in factories, construction, mines, agriculture and others.

Yes, but as a total of America its groiwng vanishingly smaller. Automation.

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