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0 pointscausality05y ago0 comments

You could hold the director of the FAA at gunpoint and they still wouldn't let personal planes fly close enough to each other to make this remotely scalable. Even if you pulled the nonexistent vehicles out of a hat like magic we missed the social acceptance window. Automobiles emerged at a time when nobody really cared about safety regulations and they've continuously gotten safer, so nobody has a problem with the current 1.5 fatalities per 100 million vehicle-miles. These personal air vehicles could hit that value but it wouldn't be nearly good enough. We won't accept that in something new. We barely accept the airlines' current 0.2 deaths per ten billion passenger-miles safety record; they'll never accept a danger value 750 times as high.

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Sebb7675y ago

> we missed the social acceptance window.

I don't think that's the reason we accept the higher death rate of cars. In cars, you feel like you have direct influence on whether you die, or at least you know the person in control. This might not be the actual case, but it's enough to make people save.

Compare this to planes: You're flown in big machines you don't understand by people you don't know and, if something goes wrong, you can do nothing but protect your head and hope for the best. Also, you have no way out - if an engine fails, prepare for quite some time of horror. Compared to a car, where you might have some unpleasant deceleration, but safety is always very near.

I'm pretty sure these factors are the main reason we are so wary of aviation deaths compared to car deaths.

causality0OP5y ago

Still, I think the age has something to do with it. The death rate for motorcycles is 24 times higher than that for cars but we would never allow a car missing enough safety features to be comparably dangerous on the road. You couldn't get regulators and the public to accept, say, 80 mile per hour electric rollerblades even if you could demonstrate they were just as safe as motorcycles.

lisper5y ago

> Still, I think the age has something to do with it.

No, it's the externalities. When you fly you don't just put yourself at risk, you put others at risk as well. Roads are designed to isolate faster-moving vehicles from people and property so the people who die are mostly the occupants of the vehicles and there is not much collateral damage. But it's not possible to isolate air traffic this way. So it's not just the occupants of aircraft who die, it's people sitting in their living rooms watching TV when a plane suddenly comes crashing through their roof.

Also, the limiting factor on air travel is not technology, it's takeoff and landing space. Even VTOL aircraft need a lot more room to takeoff and land than a car does because there's a blast zone.

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