Living in first world country it's easy to be biased against race to the bottom - it hurts previously very well paid jobs and breaks established status quo.
But that race to the bottom made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable, and as a result likely saved and improved countless numbers lives (lifting out of poverty, ability to travel for treatments, ability to see your loved ones, ability to travel for work, etc).
And to put things in perspective - air travel is still safest form of travel, even accounting for MAX, and during this whole race to the bottom it was constantly improving, by orders of magnitude.
Point being, just that something has some upsides does not mean that it is a good thing overall. I personally believe that if flying millions of people across the globe is truly impossible without reckless exploitation of people and resources, we should rather not do that, no matter what the benefits of that would be.
This is illogical reasoning. We should look at the cost/benefit tradeoff. Looking only at costs or only at benefits will not yield the best decision.
We need to draw a line somewhere between safety & cost. I'd argue it is always possible to make something safer if you are willing to accept higher cost. Expensive plane tickets have negative externalities, and for some, does cost lives (inability to get treatments for ex.).
I don't think that is a good example. If the treatment you need requires you to fly, that means it a very complicated diseases, or a rare disease that only a few centers treat. In any case, it is likely that the care is very resource intensive and is either expensive or heavily subsidized. In those cases, even if the airfare were doubled or tripled, it would not be the limiting factor in treatment.
I'm not saying it necessarily applies for life-saving treatments AFAIK, but not everyone agrees on what medical care is. For example, in the U.S. it has been shown that state abortion restrictions hit the lower-income segment much harder precisely because they cannot afford to travel to states which have more liberal laws concerning abortion.
It doesn't have to be a rare disease—it can just mean that non-basic healthcare is hard to access.
Example: I live in the Philippines. Its healthcare system is affected by two things: centralization and the fact that the country is an archipelago.
Most quality health care is happening in Metro Manila. What you find outside is generally very basic, and even in 2nd-tier cities like Cebu or Davao they may refer you to Manila for something you'd think they ought be able to do.
With travel by boat being … rather slow, with vacation time not exactly ample, and the average salary being low I'm quite certain that affordable flights ($25 Cebu - Manila) are making ample difference in terms of what kind of healthcare situations are being addressed.
It is common enough that there is an entire organization (Angel Flight) dedicated to it. Using private planes and private pilots which are significantly less safe than commercial.
Another example is family members overseas. Many have to choose between providing for their family vs. being with their family. Affordability of flights can have a huge impact on their quality of life and ability to take part in the moments that many of use take for-granted.
This is partially self-inflicted. Cheap air travel incentivizes more people to move overseas because they know their families are just a flight away. I once knew a person that lived and worked in the UK, but studied in Poland - she flew back and forth twice a month(!). I guess it would be fine, if not for the environmental costs.
Anyway, I have this feeling that you could justify just about anything if you dig for nth-order effects, but it doesn't change the fundamental point: a race to the bottom sacrifices everything that can be sacrifices. Environment is usually the first victim, quality the second, but safety trade-offs are eventually made too. At some point in a product category's lifecycle, one starts to wonder whether it's so degraded that it would be better if it didn't exist anymore.
And n-th order effects and externalities are specifically excluded from corporate accounting.
Which means we don't know how much these things actually cost in real terms. We also don't know how to quantify potential benefits.
(And if someone says 'Well, that's subjective' - so is nominal market value.)
There's conventional profit-loss accounting, and there's everything else. It seems the everything else can accumulate to ecosystem-threatening levels, and conventional accounting will continue to pretend this is financially irrelevant.
If flying were very expensive for consumers, it would probably be a lot more expensive for the military too. Civilian aviation probably provides a lot of R&D that is used in military planes.
The discussion here is about more or less expensive air travel, within reasonable multiples. Al Qaeda would’ve probably been able to justify and afford 10x what it paid for its airfare so that’s mostly a matter of passenger air travel existing in the first place.
But memories are short and greed is long, and those who “forget” that every safety reg was written in the blood of others can sleep easy beneath golden parachutes and very good lawyers.
Honestly, best thing Boeing could do now is rename it the “737 MAX Fight Club Pinto”, fill it with all the incels who didn’t get the joke, and fly the whole crapload off into the great unknown.
In my opinion, Milton is right in that clip. Everyone agrees that we need to draw the line somewhere, define some level of safety as 'good enough'. IE flying is more dangerous in IFR conditions, so we could ban all commercial flights during those conditions. However that line is not the same for everyone. Most people are fine with accepting the slightly higher risk involved in flying during low visibility.
Risk tolerances are different, so why do we try to regulate to a given standard. It makes little sense to allow motorcycles yet have a regulation that requires the use of seatbelts in cars. Instead, I'd like to see regulations that enforce testing and information sharing. After that, let people decide which airline to take, which car to buy, and therefore where to draw that line.
If travel is necessary for medical treatment, it ought to be covered by insurance, so the price shouldn't matter. Medevac flights, aka air ambulances, are a thing.
"covered by insurance" doesn't mean much if you're still billed $10k or more after insurance.
My father has decent insurance as a retiree and still got billed for an ambulance ride after he had complications following a jaw surgery.
I've seen a bunch of anecdotal stories about how it's cheaper for someone on the west coast to fly to Korea, or down to Mexico, for non-critical surgeries, spend a week recovering, and then fly home.
I think it's a fair assumption that the US healthcare system would have been overhauled long before the complete elimination of the competitive market for commercial air travel, which is what this thread is about.
Isn’t this just another case of perfect being the enemy of good? If flying for a couple of hours is already safer than driving for 10, but we don’t want flying without a perfect safety record (making it much less accessible via much higher ticket prices)...then are we simply doomed? Instead of 99.95% reliability, do we really spend 10x more to get to 99.995%?
Drunk driving is low hanging fruit: it is really bad and easy to get rid of without great cost to society. It is incomparable to what is going on in the aviation industry.
I think the difference is psychological: you are in control of your car and you feel safer because of it. A plane gives you no control so you want more guarantees.
Als: Planes add another dimension of things which can go wrong so maybe that is also involved.
> made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable, and as a result likely saved and improved countless numbers lives
Except for the climate change part. Continued carbon emissions threaten billions of lives.
To keep our planet inhabitable current-fuel air travel must be reduced to a tiny fraction of its current scope within the next few decades (alongside many other drastic changes to transportation, industry, and electricity generation). It’s not clear that alternative power sources for air travel will be practical at large scale any time in the near future.
Keep in mind that as a fraction of emissions, air travel is actually quite small, about 2-3% [1] (and this is from a harsh article). There's some concern that as the industry grows (roughly 5% a year) and other sectors decarbonize, air travel will consume a larger fraction of remaining "carbon budget" (25-50% depending on where you look).
Clearly as the denominator shrinks, and the numerator grows even slowly, percentage increases. That said, it's probably not the main issue in in climate change or even close to it. Other sectors such as ground transport, industrial heat (cement, steel etc.), agriculture (primarily fertilizer) and other fixed sources (buildings/homes) are a bigger deal.
If we end up with airlines as the last carbon source, that's probably OK if we deal with the rest. 25% or even 50% of remaining budget is fine if the rest of the (easier) problems get solved. Air travel is uniquely hard, let's get the easier stuff first.
It's true that, overall, air travel isn't a large fraction of our carbon emissions. But that's entirely do to that fact that most people don't fly. Every trip you make across the Atlantic and back takes about 10% of a typical American's yearly carbon emissions. If you're a typical person who doesn't fly then indeed it's not worth worrying about the flying that other people are doing. But if you're someone who flies every year or especially multiple times a year then cutting down is probably one of the most significant things you can do for the environment.
How many of those trips are cuttable? Maybe one or two business trips. And businesses would already rather teleconference these days if the trip is really avoidable. Given how cumbersome and expensive flying is already, I'm not sure there's a huge amount of "waste" in the system to cut at the moment.
As for the occasional personal trip (I assume by # of people though maybe not # of miles flown, the far more common use case, only 12% of passengers are business travel[1]), should we be telling people, "no you're not going to see grandma for christmas"?
I'd imagine a lot of them are cuttable. I have a friend who regularly flies to the US (from the UK) to run conferences. Frankly it's ridiculous that they don't hire someone from the US to so it.
With modern video calling technology, how many business trips are really essential? Some sure, but a lot could be cut, or merged into fewer longer trips.
You're right I think some are overdone. One example is the consultants taking a plane 2x a week (leave early monday, come back thursday eve, often with unconstrained distances). Maybe a bunch of those could be cut, though in that case I think a lot of these business models offer a "premium" service. If you're paying $1M/quarter for a McKinsey contract or for an I-banker or a big 4 accountant you definitely want to see that person physically. Though keep in mind McKinsey is also probably less price sensitive than the average flyer.
Still even with that, I'd like to better understand the economics. If only 12% of trips are business vs pleasure, killing all business trips won't move the needle in the long run. There's some question of how long business trips are, you can be 12% of trips but if they're longer it's worse.
My overall point is that there are a lot of factors in how people chose to travel. It's far from clear that increasing the already quite high price is what's going to deter people unless you tax it massively. In which case we'll effectively return to a situation like the pre-deregulation days where only the rich flew, which may be fine, but should be directly considered.
In terms of impact there's a generally accepted ~2.7X multiplier applied to flight emissions:
"Among the reasons for this focus is that these emissions, because they are made at high altitude, have a climate impact that is commonly estimated to be 2.7 higher than the same emissions if made at ground-level." [0]
So you can look at 2-3% of co2, or you can look at impact and if we use the co2 proportion as a proxy of overall emissions, ~8% in terms of impact - and growing fast.
I wonder what the emissions from a methane powered suborbital BFR is compared with a 16 hour flight, especially if that methane was generated from CO2 extraction from the air using renewable sources of electricity.
3% of global emissions being due to air travel, when 4/5 of the world population has never set foot in an airplane, is incredibly huge, not quite small. This is an activity almost entirely engaged in by the very wealthy, that has a huge adverse effect on the planet.
Taxing air travel to reduce frivolous trips would be a great policy. Add fast trains between major US cities.
What you say isn't wrong, but when you're asking what the most impactful changes to the current system would be, the absolute climate impact of flying vs. other sources of greenhouse gases needs to be considered.
Which is to say, the world-wide policy priorities need to be on transportation (other than flying), electricity production and industrial emissions [0]. Giving up coal and petrol cars has potentially much greater impact than giving up flying.
That said, when you consider the CO2 emissions that you cause yourself directly, a good rule of thumb is that as soon as you fly at all, CO2 from flying dwarfs all your other CO2 emissions. On the individual level, not flying, flying less, or offsetting carbon emissions from flying has the biggest impact.
I think reducing CO2 emissions from a personal level is the wrong way to go about it. It needs to be addressed from a more higher level, because the majority of CO2 emissions cannot be attributed to a single person.
Take for example shipping, which uses 4.5% of global co2 emissions, yet most people haven't stepped on a ship in their lifetime, and never will!
Shipping also very often uses the dirtiest of fuels and is therefore much more polluting than airliners which burn quite high quality refined fuels. That's why, to get around recent laws limiting sulfur emissions, large container boats now first "scrub" their exhaust gasses with sea water, so all sulfur will now nicely pollute and acidify our oceans. [0] No emissions though, because emissions bad.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that this is not a problem that should be solved individually. I don't hold my breath for what the higher ups are coming up with though, their measures seem misguided at best, deliberately loop-holed at worst.
Like every time this comes up, there are 7.5 billion humans on the planet and thus no need to only do X or only do Y. We can and must reduce every aspect of our global pollution problem, right now, or it will kill the majority of humanity. We aren't resource-constrained. This isn't a 5-person startup where you have 5 workers and that's it. You can put a million people (if needed) to work on fixing air travel at the same time as you put a million people (if needed) to work on any other aspect of climate change.
All arguments that we shouldn't fix X climate problem because it's less important than Y are just arguments that we shouldn't fix climate problems because the arguer doesn't want them fixed.
No individual actions have any effect at all, and people who argue about them are, again, just distracting from the important work of creating collective solutions.
Yes, it's more efficient to concentrate on making one thing better. If you have a limited amount of people. But leaving the flying industry to play freely, the amount of saved environment will just move to the airplanes instead of taking the car. There is nothing that says we all can't do our part in lowering environment cost wherever we work.
I take your point, though I'm not sure taxes are the answer. Very rarely is air travel even close to the cheapest option (in the US here, Europe has low cost airlines that may shift the math). Although I'm pretty well off as compared to the average person, I don't know anyone personally who takes the plane purely on a whim, and I know nobody who prefers to fly when another comparable time option is available. If you were to tax air travel at say 10%, that would likely not change my travel, just make it more expensive. A $200 ticket now costing $220 isn't going to make me not take the flight. If you tax it more, sure I won't take the flight, but then you reduce quality of life given that in many places the alternatives don't exist.
In Europe I usually take the train places. If it's 2-3h away by train it's usually faster to take the train, and it's often (though not always) comparable or cheaper on price. In the US, I virtually never take the train, there simply aren't adequate options. The distances tend to be much larger, and we simply haven't built the infrastructure. We could build it, but that's proven quite hard (see CA high speed rail and efforts to modernize northeast corridor) for both political and practical reasons. NY<->DC I often take the bus, it's cheaper and only a slight time penalty vs. the train.
4/5 people sounds like a big number but those people are much more likely to start eating meat or buy a car at first than to fly. That's a way bigger problem environmentally.
In europe, jet fuel isn't taxed at all (but train/car fuel is) which often makes flying the cheaper option. From london, I can fly to several european cities cheaper than I can get a 2 hour train within the UK. Which is pretty ridiculous.
A train with 500 seats running London to Manchester costs about £4/mile in electricity, of which 20p will be VAT (which I think is reclaimed) - so tax would be about £35, or 7p per passenger.
A flight of a 150 seat plane from London to Manchester attracts £3900 in tax.
Not in most of the USA (well, it is electric generated from a diesel hybrid). Electrification over large distances is expensive, the only country to have done that so far are the Chinese (and even then they don’t bother with way out Tibet...yet).
The USA is big but not that big. It's about twice as wide as Sweden is tall. Sweden is all electric rail. From the south of Sweden to Rome, is the same distance as Sweden is tall.
All of Sweden's rail is electric and most of Europe's too.
Sweden’s population is confined to a narrow corridor, so it’s not like they need many lines of coverage. Likewise, density in Europe is good enough to make electrification worthwhile, while America is way too spread out. An extreme case would be Australia, imagine electrifying the entire route from Melbourne to Darwin.
> In europe, jet fuel isn't taxed at all (but train/car fuel is) which often makes flying the cheaper option. From london, I can fly to several european cities cheaper than I can get a 2 hour train within the UK. Which is pretty ridiculous.
Australia and America are irellevent. Almost all long distance trips in Europe is electricity
That's wild, agreed that is out of step. I usually book fairly last minute so I haven't seen those prices personally, but I know they exist. I surely don't believe we should favor air over train.
This is out of context. Same thing could be said with the advent of the internet and massive energy consumption that came with it. The debate here is about the effect the technology had on day to day human lives, not on the optimization of it afterwards.
> Global air travel is projected to significantly increase in the future without any obvious way to sufficiently reduce its carbon footprint.
I think we all understand that flying is not "green" or "sustainable".
> To keep our planet inhabitable current-fuel air travel must be reduced to a tiny fraction of its current scope within the next few decades (alongside many other drastic changes to transportation, industry, and electricity generation). It’s not clear that alternative power sources for air travel will be practical at large scale any time in the near future.
> If you uncritically define negative consequences as “out of context” then every technology can be declared to be an unalloyed good.
Reminds me of something really out of context: food. I was shocked when a gym trainer told me that if my goal is weight loss, I must focus on what I eat.
(I am not a vegetarian or a vegan btw) To keep our planet inhabitable, we must reduce the amount of meat we consume and alter our diet very significantly. I know this is a fact and yet I continue to stuff our faces like there's no tomorrow. I don't fly a lot but I eat a lot. I actually enjoy eating (to the point that it wasn't obvious to me that many people don't). It would be very hypocritical of me to suggest that there be a huge surcharge to discourage people from flying but no surcharge on meat products, leather, almonds, ...
> Continued carbon emissions threaten billions of lives.
It does not.
Climate change is real and will cause serious problems. It will emphatically NOT threaten billions of lives. The people who tell you that are either misinformed or lying.
On the other hand, the new pricing structure means some airlines shut down and other airlines cut out unprofitable/less-profitable flight routes entirely, making it more difficult for some people to travel. ️
Reportedly a lot of this is because deregulation eliminated many requirements that previously forced airlines to service less-profitable areas, in a similar fashion to how the USPS is required to provide service to Anyone instead of just people in profitable areas.
It's not the safest way to travel if you look at per trip or per hour spent death ratio [0]. To have even more correct numbers you'd have to add death ratio for transport to/from the airport as well.
Usually, when comparing modes of travel, a person has some destination in mind which is a fixed distance in mind. If you're just trying to get out of the house, say, then I'd agree that air travel is a more dangerous way to do it than driving around the block. But if you're trying to travel to a specific place for business, family, or vacation then it makes sense to compare based on danger per mile.
But then you should probably only compare trips with somehow similar distances/times involved right?
Since I'm unlikely to fly my 20 mile commute to work, logging those miles under the "drive car" category isn't comparable, but is likely how I'd be in a car accident since that's something like 75% of my driving life. It seems you should only compare flights of 3 hrs vs car trips of 3 hours, or similar.
I’m not following. If I want to go visit my family 700 miles away for a holiday, I should most reasonably compare driving there with flying there as the risk choice is between those two manners of getting there.
Comparing flying for an hour vs driving for an hour isn’t a comparison between two substitute goods, unless the purpose of my trip was “to kill an hour”, making those valid substitutes.
Its normalized by distance, so the fact that 75% of your driving is short trips doesnt matter. You could argue that you need to look at only sustainable trips, but I think its unlikely to change the conclusion that per mile flying is safer than driving on a per mile basis.
You'd need to set some minimum trip distance for which flying is a viable alternative, like say 300 or 500 miles. Then throw out all the driving data for under that. Now, how would you expect this to shift the deaths/mile of driving?
In order to reduce it, driving short trips would have to be more dangerous per mile than driving long trips. I think this is unlikely to be true. Long trips often take place on highways at higher speeds and thus accidents have higher consequences. Drivers are more likely to be fatigued on longer trips. Drivers are less likely to be familiar with the roads on longer trips.
You've probably also got to throw out all flights for which driving is not a possibility. Like transcontinental trips. That may make flying appear safer since flights over oceans are more dangerous since there arent as many emergency landing opportunities.
> driving short trips would have to be more dangerous per mile than driving long trips. I think this is unlikely to be true.
I would be shocked to find that short trips were safer (per-mile) than long trips, as my intuition is that interstate highways are likely to be by far the safest type of roadway on a per-mile basis.
So I did some digging. It was surprisingly hard to find data that broke it down by roadway type, but I eventually found an article[1] that also linked to data[2].
Taking the most recent year available [2004], and converting to the typical airline standard (deaths per 10 billion miles travelled), urban interstates have a death rate of 57 deaths/10Bmi, urban collector roads 85 deaths/10Bmi, urban local roads 128 d/10Bmi, and rural local roads 315 d/10Bmi.
Airline figures for comparison are about 0.2 deaths per 10Bmi for scheduled commercial airline travel (Delta, United, Southwest, American, etc; not charter, not corporate, not general aviation), yet people are much more fearful of airplanes than automobiles on average.
Higher speeds does not necessarily equate to a more dangerous trip.
High speed delta to predominant flow is the more accurate metric.
Your fatigue comment is well received, but not a given either. A person may feel driving in a fatigued state is more acceptable for a short trip, but enforce more rigid limits on behavior for a long trip from home.
A foot or bicycle journey is not comparable to a commercial flight (except in the case of a few, statistically insignificant, cases). Furthermore, one flies commercially in order to get from A to B, not to spend a certain amount of time doing it, so the risk per hour is not a particularly useful figure.
> Furthermore, one flies commercially in order to get from A to B, not to spend a certain amount of time doing it
This isn't actually true for recreational travelers. People roughly spend the same amount of time traveling as before commercial flight, they just go further.
To put it differently, people generally have the same vacation time available to them. They're also generally willing to burn roughly the same fraction of their vacation on the travel portion.
Commercial air travel has just enabled people to travel further in the same amount of time, while also burning more fuel doing so vs. the alternatives (road, rail...)
What's implied in your statement is that the introduction of air travel reduced overall fuel consumption vs. where it was at when people traveled more by automobile.
This is obviously not the case.
Trying to compare the two "per pax mile" ignores the fact that the convenience of air travel createdmoretravel than it ever saved in fuel efficiency as a bulk mover. It covers longer distances in generally less time and more comfort, it created a new class of travel in an additive fashion, it didn't strictly replace the alternatives.
If we're actually debating fuel and emissions on a large scale, this is a major part of the larger picture.
Furthermore, since the primary dimension which matters to individuals is time and cost not distance, when you'd compare a vacation by automobile to flight, the automobile vacation would likely be to a nearer destination. So one shouldn't even be comparing equal distances if attempting such a comparison, it's just not comfortable and/or worthwhile for most people to drive across the country for a weekend trip - many will do that flight without batting an eye.
Fortunately modern vehicles, especially the likes of Teslas and supercharger networks completely destroy even your disingenuous comparison.
That's a fair point, though, in these cases, I suspect cost is even more of a determinant (and as train travel is often more expensive than flying, trains would probably also look safer by that measure, too!)
If someone invents a plane which has the same probability of death flying between point A and point B, but gets there in half the time, it's not really less safe.
> But that race to the bottom made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable
This is a point that needs to be made more often.
I'm not sure more access to air travel has made people's lives better (different, sure)... but it's not like the flying experience has been getting worse in a vacuum. AFAIK, way more people have access to it today than did half a century ago.
When reading old novels and travel logs up to a century ago, the main difference is that people took their time. Travelling often took days or weeks, but it was okay since there was no alternative, and since enjoying the journey was sometimes a part of the process. It's amusing to read about trains that stopped for 2 hours so that passagers could go out for lunch. Trains and boats were places were you lived and met people.
Since travelling was slow, people had to adapt. From Paris, a bourgeois family could spend a day or two in the neighboring countryside, but if they wanted to visit Italy or Russia, you'd stay there for a few months. Nowadays, it's the same: from Paris, a middle class family can spend the week-end at Tunis, but they will take two weeks of holidays for Thailand. Yet our time-constrained lives have made months-long stays less frequents.
What you're missing is the vast majority of people simply never traveled any real distance from their hometown at all. Spending a few months visiting Italy sounds lovely, but most people have always been too time-constrained for that kind of luxury.
> air travel is still safest form of travel, even accounting for MAX
That wholly depends on how often you fly those damn death traps. I highly doubt accounting for just the MAX alone would still give you the same result (safest form of travel). My car sure feels safer than a MAX, but I didn't run the numbers.
USA innovated and created POTS, land line phones - and then again with wireless phones/radio phones that ultimately became cell phones.
Emerging countries skipped all that, landline, pots, regulation of monopolies and ultimately in the end just were able to put in some towers and voila, cell phones all w/ imported technology that majority of people in that emerging country do not understand to the equilivent of magic.
If there is no profit, it won't be built. Many countries didn't get cell phones until late 00's. Where now it's not really a cell phone, but "facebook."
Your points about cost reduction spreading wealth and access don't preclude the idea that a race to the bottom incentive might pass a stress tolerance threshold somewhere.
Yes, it's certainly a tricky one. But note that deregulated markets not only allow harmful race-to-the-bottom style behaviour, they all but require it, because "good apple" companies will be outcompeted by those cutting corners.
I think it's worth considering the effect that political and social narratives have on this. Reagan-style politics not only deregulates markets, it pushes a moral narrative that it is righteous to exploit the market as far as you possibly can, even when that means taking advantage of market flaws and externalities such that you are causing a net societal harm.
Their ideology is such that this is "capitalistic" and therefore good, and so we should not attempt to curb, regulate or otherwise discourage such behaviour. This has no basis in economic theory, and it's causing huge harms to our society (and economy).
Could this "lifting out of poverty" nonsense stop. In the West people have been put into poverty in the last decades, precisely because decent medium skilled jobs were exported by greedy managers who hide behind multiculturalism as a rationale.
To these people multiculturalism is just a means to increase the size of the industrial reserve army.
But that race to the bottom made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable, and as a result likely saved and improved countless numbers lives (lifting out of poverty, ability to travel for treatments, ability to see your loved ones, ability to travel for work, etc).
And to put things in perspective - air travel is still safest form of travel, even accounting for MAX, and during this whole race to the bottom it was constantly improving, by orders of magnitude.