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Comment by Asraelite | Hacker News Reader

How many lives would that really save? We've improved airline safety to the point that there's only a single major disaster every few years. Consider how few lives extra emergency exits have actually saved in the past decade. I would guess less than 10.

If that is the price we pay for a huge range of other improvements then I think it's worth it.

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What an absolute rubbish idea. That's not how it works, at all.

There are so few lives lost thanks to the stringent requirements put in place, like the mandatory 90 second evacuation rule. Remove these requirements, and it's a guarantee that the numbers will go up, sooner rather than later.

Like most of those rules, the evacuation rules were established after a very thorough analysis of previous accidents, painstakingly determining who died where, and from which cause. It is not some number pulled out of thin air that is suddenly irrelevant thanks to "technology".

The MAX saga is a very good reminder of what happens when you start playing loose with those rules. People die. Quickly, and in mass.

And, as "luck" would have it, we are not even 3 months into 2024, and we have already been served the perfect, actual, counter example to this proposal: the JAL flight, where 379 lives where saved thanks to rapid evacuation.

I'll leave a nice little article link from January here. It just happens to have the perfect headline:

https://apnews.com/article/japan-plane-fire-safety-jal-tokyo...

Well since you're against me anyway, let me double down: current airline regulations are way, way too strict in every way and are based entirely on an irrational overreaction people have to aircraft incidents because flying feels unnatural.

Increasing airline deaths to even over 1000 per year for marginally increased comfort would be worth it.

If anyone actually cared about saving lives then all focus would be on motoring, not planes. Planes should not be as safe as they are.

> Increasing airline deaths to even over 1000 per year for marginally increased comfort would be worth it.

You're aware that if there are 2-6 major airline crashes per year, many people would skip flying all together, killing the industry in the process, right?

Yeah, which is unfortunate. Maybe in the distant future cultural perceptions of flying will change enough that this is no longer true.

> an irrational overreaction people have to aircraft incidents because flying feels unnatural

Do you have anything to back this statement up?

Not really. I feel it's sort of self-evident if you look at how the media covers aircraft accidents and how people are afraid of flying and talk about it. I don't know how to prove it though.

If you have another theory I'd love to hear it, but I think it's pretty clear that the public overreacts to airline deaths for some reason at least.

No, I'm not against you. I'm against an idea that is a dangerous gateway to certain death.

The current airline regulations are not way to strict. The current airline regulations are what they are to ensure, through lessons learned the hard way, that certain steps are taken to no make avoidable mistakes that have cost many lives in the past.

As for the lives lost to motoring, that's a completely unrelated problem.

It isn’t really completely unrelated though. I often drive for 6 hours between cities due to speed, comfort, and cost. I am certainly more likely to die for it.

We should apply more rules to cars. The solution clearly isnt to relax airplane regulation.

There literally was just a plane with 400 people in it that crashed. All of them escaped threw the exits and did so safly and efficently. The plane then burned down.

So literally just in the last few month your argument is wrong.

I wonder what the math would be in saved lives due to reduced CO2 emissions vs accidents.

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