Something to Ponder When You Fly Cheap

I'm certain that I could teach my children to drive. Someone else has already taught their's how to drive.
But it would be no problem to put a child in a car and teach them how to use the pedals and how to steer it straight.

My guess is that this is not that much different from learning how to fly. Although a bit more technical, my guess is that I could learn to take a plane up, fly it straight for a bit, and then turn it around for a landing. A few more skills and I could do a bit more.

I'm thinking of this as I was flying to Orlando last year on a low-cost airline. The price of the ticket was about 1/2 to 1/3 of what the major carrier serving the same route was charging. And I was aware that the low-cost carriers pay their pilots much less than the legacies pay theirs, much of that difference attributable to the airline industry being cartelized prior to deregulation. It is still crumbling.

But I was thinking that one of the major differences between the low-cost carrier and the bigger carrier was the experience of the pilot. Could it be that my pilot was like the kid in the car? As long as he can just go straight and knows how to stop and start I am o.k. But once there is a problem that requires more skills I'm doomed. Low cost carriers do, however, have a pretty good safety record. Maybe the bigger carriers still have better trained pilots who are more adept at handling emergency situations, while their low-cost competitors are not.

This thought was going through my mind as the plane approached the airport in Orlando. Everything went fine and the plane landed smoothly. Maybe we were just going straight for most of the flight.

Addendum: In the comments a question is asked about the safety of airline travel vs. automobile travel, notwithstanding my conjecture. Since deregulation airline safety has continually improved. From Alfred Kahn:

Air travel is unequivocally safer now than it was before deregulation. Accident rates during the twelve-year period from 1979 to 1990 were 20 to 45 percent (depending on the specific measures used) below their average levels in the six or twelve years before deregulation. Moreover, by taking intercity travelers out of cars, the low airfares made possible by deregulation have saved many more lives than the total number lost annually in air crashes.

Of course, the margin of safety may have narrowed. The skies have become more crowded and airlines may, under pressure of competition, have cut corners. If so, the proper remedy is not economic regulation, but more spending on policing safety, air traffic control, and airports.

My point was not that since low cost carriers have entered the market safety has been compromised. Only that more recent entrants like Independence Air, Air Tran, Spirit, etc., have had to hire younger and more inexperienced pilots, which enables them to lower their costs. But as I noted, this has not seemed to compromise the safety record of new entrants. Although I have not seen any hard data, it seems that new start-ups are no less safe than their legacy competitors.

And the argument that we are worse off by not flying and driving instead is absolutely correct. The average person has a roughly 436 times greater likelihood of dying in a car crash as opposed to a plane wreck.

Comments

[True_Liberal]

A fair question - and it deserves a fair answer.

Consider the following: Engines are so reliable today that a professional pilot can likely fly his entire career - forty years or more - without encountering a real engine failure. But a transport pilot trains for this possibility over and over. Similarly with other sorts of emergencies.

Whether the training is done in a ground-based simulator, or in a real plane, it is very realistic; and it is regularly repeated so the pilot maintains a high degree of proficiency in emergency situations.

By contrast, how many drivers you know have even half-a-clue about all the check lights that flash before you start your car's engine?

The biggest risk to the traveling public is HIGH ticket prices, which tend to force more passengers out of planes and onto the highway, where the accident rate is much greater.