so maybe I would choose to fly on an airline that was, say, twice as dangerous in order to save fifty bucks
so your life, as per your own evaluation, is worth about $50 savings… good to know, now I can value your opinion based on that.
You’re confusing “an increase of 100%” with “an increase to 100%”. An increase of 100% means something is twice as dangerous as it was before, not that it will certainly cause death.
The last flight I took covered a distance of approximately 2,500 miles. Estimates of aviation safety vary based on the time period considered but Wikipedia says:
The number of deaths per passenger-mile on commercial airlines in the United States between 2000 and 2010 was about 0.2 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles.
If we use that estimate, a 100% increased risk corresponds to an additional chance of dying of 0.000005%. According to actuarial tables, a person my age has a chance to die on any particular day of roughly 0.001%. This means that doubling my chance of dying on that flight is about as dangerous as just living my normal life for 432 seconds.
(The data from the actuarial table is the weighted average over the large majority of time that a person is very safe and much shorter intervals of much greater danger, so 432 seconds is actually an underestimate. I think my point stands.)
You’re confusing “an increase of 100%” with “an increase to 100%”. An increase of 100% means something is twice as dangerous as it was before, not that it will certainly cause death.
No, I understood it. The thing is I would never want a corporation deciding what risk I should take so they are more profitable.
What you describe is a race to the bottom and even when it’s currently more or less hypothetical, we have already seen, recently in this industry, how penny pinching can lead to people’s deaths.
There is zero (ZERO) logic for airlines to charge customers to chose a seat except greed. You are so brain washed by the idea that it is the right of corporations to be as greedy as possible that you are now completely blind to it.
I also wouldn’t want a corporation deciding what risk I should take. That’s why I support safety ratings. They’re probably not practical for airplanes, but they work well for automobiles. The government tests how safe cars are and then lets me make an informed choice between buying the safest car or prioritizing something else.
As for greed: price discrimination is the reason why airlines have all those charges for things that don’t cost anything to provide. It actually benefits people who can’t or won’t pay much at the expense of people who can and will. (Of course it benefits the airlines too.) Here I trust greed more than I trust government regulation because deregulation made tickets a lot cheaper. Even the Atlantic (not exactly a conservative publication) is in favor of fees because they make flying more affordable.
