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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

> After all, pilots and passengers generally want, other things equal, to be safe, so an unfettered free market will deliver cost-effective safety-improving innovations over time.

Ah, such optimistic belief in the "unfettered free market"! That might be true, but aircraft operators mostly want to make as much money as possible, so if the choice is between a cost-effective safety-improving innovation and an even more cost-effective non-innovation (i.e. not doing anything), they will choose the latter.

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Without safety regulations, or any other kond of regulation, the "free market" will optimize for the bare minimum of what it can away with. And if they have to do less than even that at times, then be it.

Aviation is the only true six sigm asave industry human kind created so far because of regulations and restrictions. And not because the free market magically worked...

Phrased differently: the free market will maximise the amount of unsafety.

Well, only in case safety is perceived as more expensive than unsafety.

I think this kind of belief in free markets should be treated as equivalent to beliefs in Santa or fairies at the bottom of the garden.

'Consumers don't want to die in plane crashes so if they are killed in a plane crash they will simply avoid doing business with that company in future' is certainly... A take and I guess actually correct taken literally but uhhh, nobody listen to free market maniacs please.

What do you mean? Is this argument not correct?

Much like any complicated system, free market capitalism tends to have some emergent properties in the absence of regulation. You can see monopolies, monopsonies, cartels, and fraud. These corporate forces often have disproportionate control over the markets and can engage in anti-competitive practices that result in sub-optimal practices.

Sub-optimal practices at 40,000 feet means people die in a way that would cost pennies to prevent. Lots of people.

But the original argument i still find convincing. As i would not fly with an airline, that has death priced in. Once the word is out, it is over.

I guess it depends on whether or not you think that an airline killing a plane full of people because they skimped on safety is just the "cost of innovation". Surely you can see how some people may think it would be better to have regulations about safety beforehand that airlines have to comply with, rather than letting them do whatever they want until they kill people, right? To me, regulation makes a lot more sense than just hoping for the best from people who care about profit above all else.

Yeah, but is never that cut and dried.

Suppose there are two airlines. Statistics on them state that first one has a crash every 100,000 flights, the other every one million. You need four tickets, and four again for the way back.

How much are you willing to spend more per ticket? $10? $50? $100? $1,000?

How would you know if an airline had death priced in? Oligarchies tend to diversify into media for this reason. Oh no that tragic plane crash was obviously pilot error!

Well, iam more afraid of government, where people are numbers, than private companies, where people are money. No people no money. Even the oligarch can lose a lot. So, i still find the argument convincing.

That accidents happen is priced in, you pay for insurance.

Qantas markets quite effectively on being safe. People are pretty quick to react to markets without great regulation and it quickly becomes a key differentiator.

Ah, yes. The time before the FDA and USDA, where the food industry was famous for being easy to distinguish the safe options from the unsafe options…

You write it sarcastically but this actually was why canned food became so popular, at the beginning stages it was practically a guarantee of the brand being as close to actually safe as possible.

There was no regulation that food manufacturers had to use sanitary canned containers, it was almost purely market forces that spurred the adoption.

Of course once the canning technology became cheap enough, even low quality brands could afford to can everything, so it stopped becoming a reliable differentiator. But that was decades later.

Just try and differentiate snake oil (a petroleum distillate like baby oil) because no one likes a dry flaky snake and snake oil (from the first pressings of Tibetan mountain snakes) used in Dr MacGillacutty’s Genuine Snake Oil Restorative Tonic that cures gout, athlete’s foot, constipation, rickets, baldness, and 20 other diseases.

I can't remember the last time anyone I know chose an airline because it is "marketed on being safe".

When a choice is possible at all, price is always what makes the difference in my experience.

A decision made possible, in a sense, by the strong safety culture which is partially enforced by regulations. Even the cheap ones, in most markets, are save enough, meaning very save.

Unless you talk bush flying in Africa or Latin America, but that is a different market segment anyway.

I know, my point is that you can't count on "marketing" to ensure security.

The trap phrase there is "passengers .. want to be safe", when what it really means is "passengers . . want to feel safe". The vast majority of aviation consumers can't possibly make any sort of informed decision about safety or maintenance requirements, so what they're really buying is the experience of safety. Which of course is why regulation becomes necessary.

We could say a whole bunch of other things about when companies or people value the lives of other people - and when they decide not to - but that's tap dancing around other topics I'd rather not bump into on HN.

In personal aviation, the aircraft operator is the one who files the plane and the one who will die if something goes wrong, and that's a big reason why the rules are much more relaxed than for commercial aviation.

Those who have a personal aircraft care about safety, because of Darwinism, literally.

Literally the next sentence is “It’s possible by some lights that the market will not produce the optimal amount of safety at all relevant margins, and so regulation persists.”

Cars are significantly safer than they are required to be.

For the drivers inside, but not for everyone else. In fact, they just had getting bigger and bigger, an arms race prompted by bad regulation but kicked into perpetual high gear by standard market and consumer forces.

That's not exactly a ringing endorsement, given there are tens of thousands of auto fatalities every year. In fact, as I understand it, you are far more likely to die while driving to the airport than flying for any given trip you take.

That isn't because of the cars, it's because of the drivers. If you get into a plane crash you pretty much die; safety rules are directed to preventing crashes.

Only 2% of car crashes are caused by mechanical failure and nearly all of those are from improper maintenance rather than vehicle design flaws.

> If you get into a plane crash you pretty much die

If you're thinking about the scariest plane crashes, where the plane hits the ground at more or less cruise speed, you're right. But, when a crash occurs during take-off or landing (and that's most of the crashes, although they don't tend to capture the public's imagination as much as the others), the chances are much better. There are some photos of pretty badly broken up and/or burned planes (e.g. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/emirates-jet-burns-runway...) where you would be surprised to hear that all or most passengers managed to get out...

> But, when a crash occurs during take-off or landing (and that's most of the crashes, although they don't tend to capture the public's imagination as much as the others), the chances are much better.

This is not really attributable to planes having great safety features though, it's just the type of event which is most survivable (and which they therefore spend fewer resources trying to minimize).

It's basically like saying that people rarely die in car accidents that occur in parking lots. That's neither the reason for nor the result of the modern safety features.

probably true, the EU plans to require drivers for bigger cars to have a special drivers license to bring car crash fatalities to 0.

Only for new liscences, and that provisions seems unable to get a majority at the moment. Which kind of makes sense, why limit it to weight? EVs and most family cars are above the proposed 1.8 tons. Limiting it by power / speed (EVs have a ton of power but lower top speeds) would make more sense, similar to what we had for motorbikes in the past.

The commercial aircraft vs. private equivalent of a car is probably a train.

Or perhaps a (non air) bus

Different kinds of miles.

You would be far more likely to die landing that 737 at my grocery store.

The single biggest design factors on whether a car will kill someone they hit, is its weight and height. And cars are significantly heavier and taller than they need to be.

I learned in Driver’s Ed that if I was ever in an accident I wanted to be in a head on collision at 45 mph in a 74 Lincoln Continental hitting a 72 Chevy Vega. I think you would be hard pressed to find a heavier passenger car.

I think they were talking about people walking or cycling.

In particular, cars (like personal aircraft) are predominantly bought by the people who ride in them, so this is the kind of market where buyers will actually care about safety.

Compare this to a market where e.g. a government agency or health insurance company is choosing which product to buy for someone else to use.

Euro NCAP, for example, was a UK government initiative that was adopted continent-wide. Car makers used safety as marketing to prompt people to replace older cars with newer safer ones, and it worked in this context.

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