Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

The terrifying accident in which a door plug came off an Alaska Airlines Boeing Max 9 while in flight has heavily hit the company's reputation. People are calling for regulation to be tightened and for the FAA to have more resources to inspect Boeing facilities. Websites are offering people the chance to exclude flights with Max 9's from their searches. 

That sounds sensible, at first. But let's bear a few things in mind.

1. Terrifying as this incident was, no one was killed. 
2. Flying is, by a huge margin, the safest way to travel. Literally years at a time can go by without anyone being killed by an accident in flight. 

What if flying is too safe? 

What could I possibly mean by "too safe"? Surely we all want flights to be as safe as possible? Well, no, we don't. That's what people say with regard to pretty much all decisions, but it is not how people actually make decisions. We want a reasonable level of safety.

If increasing regulations make it slower to manufacture new planes, then longer periods will pass between replacing old equipment. Slowing down the modernization of the fleet could actually make flying more dangerous. 

But it isn't just that. If you require more frequent checks of planes between flights then you will increase delays of flights and increase the cost of flying. Cost and convenience are the two most important factors in people's decision making when deciding how to travel. Safety barely features. Increasing prices and delays will push people to travel by some other means.

And traveling by some other means is vastly more dangerous. This is not even close. Every form of transport, including walking, has more deaths per billion passenger kilometers than flying. Walking is actually the second most dangerous, after motorcycling. (It is not a remotely close second). 

The problem here is that the regulatory brief is all wrong and so are the incentives. The FAA has to minimize the number of people killed in air accidents. Its leadership will be lambasted in the media if accidents seem to be on the rise. But if the cost of each life saved in air accidents is that many – probably hundreds – of additional people will be killed on the roads, then flying is too safe. It has reached a level of safety so absurdly out of proportion with other modes of transport that the imbalance is killing people. 

Yes, I found reports of the Alaskan Airlines incident scary. I didn't even know planes had "plugged" doorways. Apparently it is because if the airline puts in more and smaller seats it is required to have more doors. Come to think of it, perhaps that is a regulation which should be reviewed as creating more danger than safety. But whether that regulation makes sense or not is something that should be determined by data, not by panic. One reason air incidents – even those with no fatalities – get massively reported is that they are extremely rare. 

So let's go with data. And the data suggest that safety would be served by making flying cheaper. If that means a handful of extra deaths in flight, more than balanced by hundreds of lives saved on the roads, we should go with that.