That is, we accept far far higher risks in other areas of our life because it would be too inconvenient and/or too expensive to solve. How much positive impact would occur if we loosened air travel safety controls?
Caution that I suggest this and a thought exercise; not an actual suggestion.
Air travel just gets more newspaper headlines than “drunk driver kills family in accident”
Almost none? I can't think of what positive impact could possibly result from that.
Increased/cheaper travel would also come with some bad externalities: Increased CO2 emissions, and possibly increased rates of cancer (high altitude is a high-radiation environment - not enough for the occasional flyer to worry about but it can add up). ...and of course the externality that lower safety controls means occasionally one of these more frequent flights will fall out of the sky.
One way to think about these kinds of questions is to reverse it - suppose flying had 10x stricter safety controls than it does today. Would the world be a better place as a result? What would be the downsides?
EDIT: I almost forgot perhaps the most important one: If flying is more convenient/cheaper, even if it's slightly less safe than currently, it is still FAR safer than driving and a shift from people driving to people flying means that relaxing flight safety may actually SAVE lives.
Yes, probably. Many places would have e.g. better rail infra if domestic flights were more expensive, and the climate would be better off.
You can argue this is anti-growth or whatever, but this is the same site complaining about RTO initiatives: Perhaps incentivizing personal travel isn't what we want to do or need anyway, and for cargo the air route really doesn't look that good.
And to re-iterate: I don’t personally think we should intentionally increase harm in this area, I just find it intriguing where we do and don’t seemingly allow harm