Belize seems nice, but it seems that lots-o-Mer’cans are moving there, so there goes the neighborhood.
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Personally, if this is endangering passenger safety, then there’s no question that the seats need to be further apart.
Of course, we all realize there is no free lunch. If the seats are further apart, the prices will rise.
So I echo the sentiment of the posters here and the original article: if you cannot afford to fly in safety, you shouldn’t be allowed to fly at all.
[quote]So I echo the sentiment of the posters here and the original article: if you cannot afford to fly in safety, you shouldn’t be allowed to fly at all
[/quote]
Except that flying is already nearly the safest form of transportation. If people can’t fly because the prices are too high and they drive instead, you are literally letting people die for safety.
Not saying we shouldn’t try to make things safer, but I doubt improving airliner evacuation is a high priority. I just looked wikipedias list of airline incidents and accidents. Since 1990, I could only find one incident in the US where evacuation was an issue. There may have been a couple more that I didn’t see, since the list is quite long and includes world-wide incidents. In most crashes, either everybody dies, or the limiting factor is not evacuation speed. EMT response time and quality actually shows up as a factor reasonably often.
If you want to study if airline crowding is dangerous, look at the health effects that affect 100% of passengers, not the extremely rare case of an emergency evacuation.
Of course, sir dickhead has to make some joke about it, the study may well be a good idea, and really congress should not even be messing with aviation safety studies directly, but I think a lot of the reaction here is based on personal discomfort, couched in disingenuous concern about safety.
Oh, and plenty of congressmen fly commercial, and for those that don’t, private aircraft are orders of magnitude more dangerous than commercial flight.
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Why? The risk differential is rather small, and you can further mitigate it by buying an aisle seat close to the exit. I for one don’t mind that the flights are affordable, and would rather dislike if the prices went up.
For a plane to be allowed into revenue service they have to test the cabin configuration by running an evacuation trial where they get a full load of passengers out in at most 90 seconds, in the dark, with smoke and debris in the cabin, using only half the exits.
Here’s an A380 being evacuated in 78 seconds:
Of course, these tests aren’t perfectly realistic- they take place with able-bodied volunteers (although FAA rules require a certain percentage of them to be over 50) who are prepared for the plane to be evacuated and all speak the same language as the flight attendants, and the choice of exits available may also not be realistic. But a plane certainly can be completely evacuated in 90 seconds.
If aircraft manufacturers pack the passengers in too much, they’ll find that their planes start failing evacuation tests.
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I agree that most of the reaction is more about comfort than safety; the issue here is that Congress is preventing research, which on just about any topic is a dangerous idea.
Flying is already so safe that I can’t imagine that any study about legroom and evacuation would find a substantial number of lives saved, and the cost per life saved would likely be extremely high. In theory, it would be really great to have a study that shows that you could save a very marginal number of lives by spending a whole lot of money in the form of putting fewer seats on planes, and another study showing that more lives could be saved for the same amount of money by (for example) buying more bio-fuel and thereby reducing the growth of CO2 emissions.
But in practice, it would be terrible. Americans don’t like playing the averages. They like to say “yeah, but what if I’m that 1 in a million who would have been saved?”
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Thanks for sharing that info. If that’s the case, why the trouble in Congress? It seems like the needed evaluations are already in place.
I find it strange that Continental Airlines gave to this guy in 2015-2016, given that Continental Airlines was merged out of existence in 2010.
Edited to add: It looks like the “Continental Airlines Inc Employee Fund For A Better America Pac” (catchy name!) still exists and takes contributions from United Airlines employees, but hasn’t changed its own name.
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Earth?
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Preferably.
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