Monday, December 20, 1999
My kingdom for an unsafe airline …
Requiring
safety seats masks deeper dangers from USA Today
This link probably
won’t be active for long, but USA Today gets it right for a change editorializing
against ridiculous “safety” regulations the government wants
to impose on airlines. In this case the Federal Aviation Administration
claims that requiring infants and small children to be strapped into child
safety seats would from 1978 to 1994.
In fact, as USA
Today notes, requiring infants to be strapped into child safety seats
would have resulted in far more children being killed. Why? Because currently
airlines offer deep discounts for small children who sit on their parents
laps while flying. Strapping those children into safety seats requires
occupying an entire seat. Since somebody must pay for all those additional
seats and associated costs, the likely airline response is a slight rise
in the cost of air travel for infants. Although many people will be price
insensitive to such small increases, it will influence a significant portion
of travelers to choose much more dangerous methods of transportation —
such as driving — over flying.
USA Today cites a 1995
FAA report, for example, that estimated discounting an infant’s seat 75%
would still result in 20 additional adult and child fatalities over a
10 year period — four times as many deaths as the FAA claims it would
save over a 16 year period. USA Today rightly excoriates the FAA, writing:
So it goes with this mandate, too. The FAA is committed to
a proposal that will camouflage the risk children face in planes, but
will not necessarily make them any safer and almost certainly will raise
the net fatality rates for the traveling public. It has made that commitment
without knowledge of cost. And it has done all of that for a segment
of the public that accounts for about 1% of all air travelers.
The obvious solution
is to give people a choice. An obvious start would be for the FAA to allow
each of the major airlines to create an alternative air company exempt
from FAA safety regulations with a few small provisos — measured on a
per mile traveled basis, the death and injury rates from these regulation-free
airlines can never exceed half of that for automobiles. These airlines
will be dangerous to travel compared to other airlines, but they will
still be twice as safe as traveling by car. The other stipulation is that
the airlines must make clear that they are exempt from FAA regulations
up front and must print on every ticket a side by side comparison of per-mile
injuries and deaths for both automobiles and the regulated airlines.
The only way such
an airline is going to remain competitive is by price competition — undercutting
its highly regulated but pricier big brothers. The result should be an
overall decline in deaths across the board both from declines in automobile
deaths as well as an additional increase from the associated savings of
both fewer deaths and injuries as well as lowered transportation costs.