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Airlines are already optimizing for flight times - time in the air is fuel burn which is a major cost input for the business. If your purpose is to save lives,

Airlines are already optimizing for flight times - time in the air is fuel burn which is a major cost input for the business. If your purpose is to save lives, and have some amount of money you're intent on spending to do so, there are many better opportunities to get better bang for your buck than either airport x-ray machines, or shortening flight times. What really bothers me is that I think that politicians and TSA bureaucrats have placed an outsized symbolic value on air security via X-ray machine, and setting in place a policy which causes real harm in sicknesses that are essentially unlinkable to the machines. Without a detailed and critical look at the effects, there will be no obvious red flags that people are literally dying for symbolism.

pdonis 14y ago
Airlines are already optimizing for flight times - time in the air is fuel burn which is a major cost input for the business. Airlines certainly try to do this, but they don't control either the weather or the air traffic control system. That said, I don't disagree that further optimization for flight times is likely to have a low payoff compared to lots of other things. My only point is that any flight time optimization that's worth more than two minutes per flight, on average, must, of necessity, have a higher payoff than changing the type of scanners at the checkpoint. politicians and TSA bureaucrats have placed an outsized symbolic value on air security via X-ray machine This argument applies to any type of scanner, not just an X-ray one. It applies equally well to the millimeter wave scanners that the article mentions as the chief alternative to X-ray scanners. And it in no way affects the point that the additional risk due to the X-ray scanner, given that you have already accepted the risk of a flight, is negligible.

pdonis 14y ago

Airlines are already optimizing for flight times - time in the air is fuel burn which is a major cost input for the business. Airlines certainly try to do this, but they don't control either the weather or the air traffic control system. That said, I don't disagree that further optimization for flight times is likely to have a low payoff compared to lots of other things. My only point is that any flight time optimization that's worth more than two minutes per flight, on average, must, of necessity, have a higher payoff than changing the type of scanners at the checkpoint. politicians and TSA bureaucrats have placed an outsized symbolic value on air security via X-ray machine This argument applies to any type of scanner, not just an X-ray one. It applies equally well to the millimeter wave scanners that the article mentions as the chief alternative to X-ray scanners. And it in no way affects the point that the additional risk due to the X-ray scanner, given that you have already accepted the risk of a flight, is negligible.