5 ms·

So while you are napping, eating or watching a movie on that flight to LAX, you should know the plane you are flying is cruising along at the ratty edge of its

So while you are napping, eating or watching a movie on that flight to LAX, you should know the plane you are flying is cruising along at the ratty edge of its capabilities. Why? Money. The higher an airliner flies, the better gas mileage it gets. As libertarian I prefer an airline which will charge me premium for flying more expensive but safer routes. However, as a realist I realize that the barrier to entry for airlines is very high and competition is sub-optimal. So I'd settle for a government mandate of how high commercial airlines can fly.

frisco 17y ago
That's a bit of a jump. How'd you go from "As a libertarian..." to "So I'd settle for a government mandate" in 3 lines?
- staunch 17y ago
  He's that smart.
- Retric 17y ago
  However, as a realist... I would assume HN would favor people who looked beyond knee jerk responces. Just because you like to use the free market when it's possible does not mean you need to apply it in all cases.
- biohacker42 17y ago
  Well simple. I really do want the market to work, but I know in reality it very often does not work at all. Most often with big industries where the startup costs are high. Do you prefer to continue to fly in a needle's eye rather then have the government step in? Ideally at least one airline would offer the safer option as a way to gain customers, but what if no one does? Is your libertarianism that pure? If so, that's admirable, I guess my ideals are just not quite as strong.
  - anigbrowl 17y ago
    Seems like a rather suicidal market strategy. So you invite people to pay 2x to fly with FlySafe (perhaps an existing airline with n outstanding safety record that rebrands itself), milk the resulting controversy to sell tickets for a while, only to later have every untoward incident, no matter how trivial, spun into a damning indictment of your business philosophy? No thanks. Furthermore, the first time such a company did have a fatal or obviously dangerous incident, they'd go insolvent immediately. I see the point you're trying to make but it's simply impractical in a mass market like commodity air travel. Uber-expensive executive flying, perhaps.
    - stcredzero 17y ago
      it's simply impractical in a mass market like commodity air travel. Uber-expensive executive flying, perhaps. If it wasn't for the coverage of this incident, I would never have known of the "coffin corner." How would market forces operate on factors of which the public is not even aware?
      - anigbrowl 17y ago
        And until that pilot landed in the Hudson, I'm betting you never thought too much about birds getting sucked into jet engines (I certainly didn't). Perhaps the conclusion from this is that there isn't really much utility in your being aware of it, since you're not a pilot. That is to say, the knowledge is of little benefit to you as a consumer because the weight of this particular factor in the overall safety of air travel is not that big. Like say you design software for something critical like medical devices, and one of these fails and somebody famous dies or a bunch of people die in different places. Suddenly everyone is talking about unit testing and software verification as it pertains to your field, someone with a talent marketing starts up safercoding.com and so on. I'm not sure the stock of human knowledge has really gone up.
        biohacker42 17y ago
        I have to disagree. For one, I think birds flying into plane engines was common knowledge. It's certainly something I've know for as long as I can remember. And when I got my CS degree we specifically studied accidents where bad software in medical devices killed people. I recall an X-ray machine where the hardware was upgraded and a bunch of software assumptions about when the fuses would blow became wrong. That ended up killing people. And as someone who has written software for medical instruments I can tell you unit test coverage is part of the contracts we sign. The coffin corner only played a small part in the accident but that's how accidents always happen. It's always several small things that go wrong together. A safe airline would not flaunt its safety record, but it's safety practice. Not flying the coffin corner would remove that one part that can go wrong from any future accident scenario. The safe airline having an accident would not automatically bankrupt it, every other airline has had accident and this one would continue with its safer then average practices. However, I agree with you this will never happen because as you say the airlines are a crap commodity business. Even Warren Buffet has mentioned how bad a business airlines are for investors. That's why even though I consider myself a libertarian I want a government mandate to stay out of the coffin corner. We already have much more complex and difficult to enforce regulations on airlines, this one is simple and would be easy to enforce as we already track all planes on rader closely all of the time.
JimmyL 17y ago
>> As libertarian I prefer an airline which will charge me premium for flying more expensive but safer routes. How would you even know? Saying "I'd pay more for a safer routing" is rather reminiscent of Steve Yegge's Shit's Easy Syndrome - you say you want a safer routing, but what does that mean? You'd pay an extra ten percent on your ticket to fly ten percent lower? What about other factors - would you demand more reinforcements on the wings of the planes you fly on? How about longer flight times due to having to stop for fuel? What about how this would impact global route scheduling? I could keep going with that, but the bottom line is that you don't understand what makes a plane safe. I don't understand what makes a plane safe. Few people - unless they're Airbus or Boeing design engineers - on this site know what makes a plane safer, and how much that would cost. Airlines have a huge interest in making their flights safe - think off all the shitty PR that Air France (one of the world's most respected airlines) and Airbus (one of two real manufacturers of jumbo jets) are getting, and how much it will directly and indirectly cost them. The last people died on an American airline was in February. Before that, it was in August 2006. The last time an American jumbo jet crashed and killed people was in 2001. Flying is an incredibly safe way to get from point A to point B - but like everything, there are some times when nature throws us a curveball, and we get hit by it. >> So I'd settle for a government mandate of how high commercial airlines can fly. I wouldn't trust Congress to determine how high an airline can fly. If I want to know how high an Airbus can safely fly, I'd ask Airbus - they know the planes better than anyone, and have a huge vested in interest in keeping them safe.
- lutorm 17y ago
  Flying lower = flying slower. You can already do that, just pick a plane that flies lower, like a commuter jet... But in general, when flying it's safer to be higher and faster. By far the most dangerous thing you might encounter when flying is the ground...
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    Instead of flying a lot lower and slower, how about marginally lower and slower? You could give the plane 50 knots leeway in speed and still fly over most of the weather out there. For conditions like the ones that the Air France flight was going through, this would seem prudent. You can't fly above thunderheads like that. Might as well get yourself into a safer part of the flight envelope in case something bad happens.
anamax 17y ago
> However, as a realist I realize that the barrier to entry for airlines is very high and competition is sub-optimal. Is the barrier actually high? (I see new airlines every so often.) What are the actual barriers? If they're govt, why isn't reducing the barriers the right response? > So I'd settle for a government mandate of how high commercial airlines can fly. And govt would get it right because that's what they do. Didn't we just have a nice discussion of regulatory capture? (My favorite comment was by someone who thought that regulatory capture was the act of promotiing govt power grabs.)
- dpifke 17y ago
  Is the barrier actually high? Besides the obvious cost of acquiring multi-million dollar jetliners (which, if bought new, typically have to be ordered 5-10 years in advance of delivery) and signing leases for gate space and hiring ground crew at airports and so on? You also need FAA and TSA approved operations plans, adding for instance the cost of screening all your employees and equipping your planes with things like black boxes and weather radar. Then you end up like Virgin America, who can't fly to Chicago because the incumbent carriers there claim there are no available gates at O'Hare (despite the number of flights in and out of the airport being down like 10-20% from previous peak). Doesn't seem that high to me...
  - ken 17y ago
    You don't need to buy new jetliners to run an airline. You can go to ILFC and rent them. Even big guys like American and Continental do this for some of their aircraft. One webpage I found suggests the lease price for a 737 is between $50,000 - $100,000 per month (which seems reasonable, or maybe a little low). Wikipedia says YouTube's bandwidth costs are estimated at $1M per day, so the hardware cost of a couple aircraft doesn't seem all that expensive. (Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about commercial aviation.)
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

frisco 17y ago

That's a bit of a jump. How'd you go from "As a libertarian..." to "So I'd settle for a government mandate" in 3 lines?

staunch 17y ago
He's that smart.
Retric 17y ago
However, as a realist... I would assume HN would favor people who looked beyond knee jerk responces. Just because you like to use the free market when it's possible does not mean you need to apply it in all cases.
biohacker42 17y ago
Well simple. I really do want the market to work, but I know in reality it very often does not work at all. Most often with big industries where the startup costs are high. Do you prefer to continue to fly in a needle's eye rather then have the government step in? Ideally at least one airline would offer the safer option as a way to gain customers, but what if no one does? Is your libertarianism that pure? If so, that's admirable, I guess my ideals are just not quite as strong.
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  Seems like a rather suicidal market strategy. So you invite people to pay 2x to fly with FlySafe (perhaps an existing airline with n outstanding safety record that rebrands itself), milk the resulting controversy to sell tickets for a while, only to later have every untoward incident, no matter how trivial, spun into a damning indictment of your business philosophy? No thanks. Furthermore, the first time such a company did have a fatal or obviously dangerous incident, they'd go insolvent immediately. I see the point you're trying to make but it's simply impractical in a mass market like commodity air travel. Uber-expensive executive flying, perhaps.
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    it's simply impractical in a mass market like commodity air travel. Uber-expensive executive flying, perhaps. If it wasn't for the coverage of this incident, I would never have known of the "coffin corner." How would market forces operate on factors of which the public is not even aware?
    - anigbrowl 17y ago
      And until that pilot landed in the Hudson, I'm betting you never thought too much about birds getting sucked into jet engines (I certainly didn't). Perhaps the conclusion from this is that there isn't really much utility in your being aware of it, since you're not a pilot. That is to say, the knowledge is of little benefit to you as a consumer because the weight of this particular factor in the overall safety of air travel is not that big. Like say you design software for something critical like medical devices, and one of these fails and somebody famous dies or a bunch of people die in different places. Suddenly everyone is talking about unit testing and software verification as it pertains to your field, someone with a talent marketing starts up safercoding.com and so on. I'm not sure the stock of human knowledge has really gone up.
      - biohacker42 17y ago
        I have to disagree. For one, I think birds flying into plane engines was common knowledge. It's certainly something I've know for as long as I can remember. And when I got my CS degree we specifically studied accidents where bad software in medical devices killed people. I recall an X-ray machine where the hardware was upgraded and a bunch of software assumptions about when the fuses would blow became wrong. That ended up killing people. And as someone who has written software for medical instruments I can tell you unit test coverage is part of the contracts we sign. The coffin corner only played a small part in the accident but that's how accidents always happen. It's always several small things that go wrong together. A safe airline would not flaunt its safety record, but it's safety practice. Not flying the coffin corner would remove that one part that can go wrong from any future accident scenario. The safe airline having an accident would not automatically bankrupt it, every other airline has had accident and this one would continue with its safer then average practices. However, I agree with you this will never happen because as you say the airlines are a crap commodity business. Even Warren Buffet has mentioned how bad a business airlines are for investors. That's why even though I consider myself a libertarian I want a government mandate to stay out of the coffin corner. We already have much more complex and difficult to enforce regulations on airlines, this one is simple and would be easy to enforce as we already track all planes on rader closely all of the time.

JimmyL 17y ago

>> As libertarian I prefer an airline which will charge me premium for flying more expensive but safer routes. How would you even know? Saying "I'd pay more for a safer routing" is rather reminiscent of Steve Yegge's Shit's Easy Syndrome - you say you want a safer routing, but what does that mean? You'd pay an extra ten percent on your ticket to fly ten percent lower? What about other factors - would you demand more reinforcements on the wings of the planes you fly on? How about longer flight times due to having to stop for fuel? What about how this would impact global route scheduling? I could keep going with that, but the bottom line is that you don't understand what makes a plane safe. I don't understand what makes a plane safe. Few people - unless they're Airbus or Boeing design engineers - on this site know what makes a plane safer, and how much that would cost. Airlines have a huge interest in making their flights safe - think off all the shitty PR that Air France (one of the world's most respected airlines) and Airbus (one of two real manufacturers of jumbo jets) are getting, and how much it will directly and indirectly cost them. The last people died on an American airline was in February. Before that, it was in August 2006. The last time an American jumbo jet crashed and killed people was in 2001. Flying is an incredibly safe way to get from point A to point B - but like everything, there are some times when nature throws us a curveball, and we get hit by it. >> So I'd settle for a government mandate of how high commercial airlines can fly. I wouldn't trust Congress to determine how high an airline can fly. If I want to know how high an Airbus can safely fly, I'd ask Airbus - they know the planes better than anyone, and have a huge vested in interest in keeping them safe.

lutorm 17y ago
Flying lower = flying slower. You can already do that, just pick a plane that flies lower, like a commuter jet... But in general, when flying it's safer to be higher and faster. By far the most dangerous thing you might encounter when flying is the ground...
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Instead of flying a lot lower and slower, how about marginally lower and slower? You could give the plane 50 knots leeway in speed and still fly over most of the weather out there. For conditions like the ones that the Air France flight was going through, this would seem prudent. You can't fly above thunderheads like that. Might as well get yourself into a safer part of the flight envelope in case something bad happens.

anamax 17y ago

> However, as a realist I realize that the barrier to entry for airlines is very high and competition is sub-optimal. Is the barrier actually high? (I see new airlines every so often.) What are the actual barriers? If they're govt, why isn't reducing the barriers the right response? > So I'd settle for a government mandate of how high commercial airlines can fly. And govt would get it right because that's what they do. Didn't we just have a nice discussion of regulatory capture? (My favorite comment was by someone who thought that regulatory capture was the act of promotiing govt power grabs.)

dpifke 17y ago
Is the barrier actually high? Besides the obvious cost of acquiring multi-million dollar jetliners (which, if bought new, typically have to be ordered 5-10 years in advance of delivery) and signing leases for gate space and hiring ground crew at airports and so on? You also need FAA and TSA approved operations plans, adding for instance the cost of screening all your employees and equipping your planes with things like black boxes and weather radar. Then you end up like Virgin America, who can't fly to Chicago because the incumbent carriers there claim there are no available gates at O'Hare (despite the number of flights in and out of the airport being down like 10-20% from previous peak). Doesn't seem that high to me...
- ken 17y ago
  You don't need to buy new jetliners to run an airline. You can go to ILFC and rent them. Even big guys like American and Continental do this for some of their aircraft. One webpage I found suggests the lease price for a 737 is between $50,000 - $100,000 per month (which seems reasonable, or maybe a little low). Wikipedia says YouTube's bandwidth costs are estimated at $1M per day, so the hardware cost of a couple aircraft doesn't seem all that expensive. (Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about commercial aviation.)

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]