What Price ValuJet?
Discount airlines ought to
be more dangerous.
(1,228 words; posted
Friday, July 5; to be composted Friday, July 12)
The Federal Aviation
Administration revealed Wednesday (July 3) that ValuJet has applied to resume
flying. You can be pretty sure the FAA is not going to approve this application
casually. Regulators shut down the discount airline after the May 11 crash in
Florida that killed 110 people. The past two months have seen a festival of
recriminations about sloppy practices at both ValuJet and the FAA. A
Washington Post editorial declared, "The public needs evidence that the
government is insisting on the highest safety standards possible."
A seemingly
unobjectionable sentiment--but there are two problems with it. The first is
that the highest safety standards possible are too high. You can always make
flying--or any other economic activity--safer by making it more expensive
(increasing the minimum distance between aircraft or time between takeoffs,
requiring wider aisles, and so on). The inevitable trade-off between safety and
cost, plus the law of diminishing returns, dictates that you stop well short of
the highest possible standards.
Second,
there is no reason every airline should meet the same level of safety. In fact,
it makes perfect sense for discount airlines to be less safe than traditional
full-price carriers. This is no excuse for negligence and rule-breaking. But if
the rules don't recognize that some people, quite rationally, will wish to buy
less safety for less money, they are doing the flying public a disservice.
Try some rough math on the back of an envelope. According
to Transportation Secretary Federico Peña, discount airlines have lowered
ticket prices, on routes where they compete, by an average of $54 (or $70 to or
from an airline "hub"). The standard statistic on airline safety is that you
could fly once a day, every day, for 21,000 years before dying in an airplane
crash. So suppose that flying discount made it 10 times more likely that
you would die in a crash. Now the odds are on a fatal crash in just 2,100
years. Is it worth it--just to save $54? Well, by my calculation (checked with
folks whose grounding in mathematics is sturdier and more recent), you're
increasing your chance of a fatal crash by about one in 855,000. Looked at the
other way, paying the extra $54 to avoid the added risk (and leaving
aside other advantages of grown-up airlines, such as the delicious meals, roomy
seats, punctual departures, on-board golf courses, etc.), puts an implicit
value on your life of about $46 million.
Now you
may think your life is worth $46 million, but unless you've got $46 million to
spend on it, that's a hollow boast. Every day you make decisions--probably
including the decision to step outside your house and risk being torn apart by
hounds as you pick up the morning paper (you could, after all, hire someone to
bring the paper inside for you every day, just to be safe)--that implicitly
value your own life at less than $46 million. Of course Freedom of Neuroses is
one of the basic American liberties we celebrate this Independence Day weekend,
and people should be free to spend $54 to avoid a one-in-855,000 risk if they
so desire. But society should not force them to do so. And society, in setting
its rules, cannot possibly value each person's life at $46 million, without
grinding to a halt.
In recent years, the FAA has been struggling with the
question of whether to require small children to fly in safety seats. The rule
has long been that kids less than 2-years-old may sit in a parent's lap--and
therefore, usually, fly for free. Flight attendants and other supporters of
safety seats make a good argument that it's a bit odd for the government to
require that coffee pots, and adults, be strapped down, but not little
children. But an FAA-commissioned study determined that requiring safety seats
would actually cost lives. How? By leading families to drive instead of
fly. The study figured that the end of small-children-fly-free would raise the
average fare for affected families by $185, causing one-fifth of them to take
the car instead. Whereas the safety seats would save an average of one child's
life per decade, the extra driving (far more dangerous than flying) would cost
nine lives. Or so the study figured. Critics objected to the calculations, but
the principle of thinking about safety in this way survives any quibbling about
the numbers.
You could think about the
discount-airline question the same way. Discounters carried some 47 million
passengers last year. What fraction of that number chose to fly instead of
drive because of the cheap fare, and how many of those would have died in
traffic accidents if they'd driven? Even in the trade-off of lives for lives,
let alone the less appealing trade-off of lives for dollars, making airlines
too safe may be a bad deal.
The discount airlines deny
vehemently that they are less safe than the majors, and the statistics show no
clear connection between price and safety. But if there isn't a connection,
that's too bad. Flying at a discount should be more dangerous. Otherwise,
you're overpaying.
SLATE News
Of all the
good stuff in this issue of SLATE, I'm probably most excited at having the
wonderful novelist Muriel Spark writing our diary column. Her Memento
Mori is one of my all-time favorites (short, mean, and funny--three
priceless qualities). She doesn't have a computer, but she'll be faxing daily
from Tuscany.
Check out
our newest feature, Ask Bill Barnes. Bill, our program manager (chief tech guy)
answers questions about problems and possibilities in reading SLATE. "Ask Bill"
is part of our E-mail to the Editors page. We've received thousands of e-mail
messages since our launch June 24 (most of them friendly, thanks), and this is
a small taste.
The
Committee of Correspondence was redesigned on the fly, three days after our
launch, when it became clear the original design (one very long page)
was too cumbersome. Try the new model; we think you'll like it. Other design
changes and "tweaks" will be coming along as this experiment continues.
What's
known around our office as "The Battle of the Curly Quotes" was fought this
week. To make our pages more attractive, we had been using quotation marks and
apostrophes that curl left or right, as appropriate, rather than all-purpose
marks that are straight vertical. But it turns out that curly quotes don't show
up at all on UNIX computers. The issue: Should we improve our appearance in a
small way for the majority, or avoid a major problem for a small (but vocal)
minority? Such are the issues that bedevil cyberpublishing. You can see for
yourself how it came out.
When
does SLATE "go to press"? Many readers are asking this, and the
answer does take some getting used to. There is new material in SLATE every
weekday. In general, the cultural reviews are posted Monday and Tuesday, the
feature articles Wednesday and Thursday, and the newsiest departments updated
Friday afternoon. Perhaps the best time to read SLATE is over the weekend. But
every article in SLATE stays "live" for at least a week, so you can read or
print out SLATE on any day and get a whole magazine. And if you do miss
something, you can always retrieve it (free) from our archive, "The
Compost."
