• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

In reality the FAA had mandated scores of safety requirements over the years, only a small proportion of which were in response to pressures following particular accidents. True enough, before putting a new rule in place the FAA conducted a cost-benefit analysis to assess whether enough lives and property would be saved to justify the cost of the regulation. Described in a certain way such reasoning can sound almost immoral. Instead of immediately mandating a reform they know will prevent fatalities, officials look at ten or twenty years’ worth of accident data and extrapolate the number of lives likely to be lost in the future. They then multiply that number by the government’s estimated value of a life ($2.6 million last I checked), add the expected dollar figure for property loss, and compare the result to the price tag for the new regulation. If the safety rule costs more than the value of the lives and property it will save, the agency may opt to let some people die.

Reporters could not avoid the temptation to juxtapose this impersonal process with poignant comments from actual women and men who had lost loved ones in crashes that could have been averted had the FAA not engaged in cost-benefit analysis. Not surprisingly, the agency did not come out looking good. But it makes no sense to impose every regulation that might save a life, regardless of cost. For one thing, each time the FAA institutes a new requirement the money has to come from somewhere. Mostly it comes from higher airline ticket prices, which in turn may prevent some people from traveling at all and push others to take to the highways, where they face greater risk of death or injury.14

Consider child safety seats, one of the media’s poster children for the evils of cost-benefit analysis. “When it comes to federal regulation of the airlines, safety experts have known for years that child safety seats could help save lives. Yet even today the airlines have more safety rules about your luggage than about your child. How could this be?” demanded Connie Chung on CBS’s “Evening News.” “You can’t hold your laptop computer on your lap, but we’ve seen in accidents, a 33-pound child allowed to be loose in the cabin,” someone from the National Transportation Safety Board declared in the report that followed, which included no rejoinder from FAA officials. “Requiring safety seats is too costly, says the FAA” is all that CBS presented of the other side of what is actually a legitimate dispute. Regulations to require safety seats would have cost about $1 billion to implement—an amount that almost certainly would save more lives if spent on other airline safety measures. 15

Reports on CBS and elsewhere in the media centered on the tragic deaths of two babies—one in an airplane accident in 1990, the other in 1994—and gave the impression that these deaths were merely two among many. In fact, as near as I can determine, they were about the only fatalities in the past several years that experts believe would have been prevented had safety seats been required. Indeed, a rule mandating child seats might well have resulted in a greater number of deaths. Were passengers forced to buy separate tickets for their children rather than carry them on their laps, some parents, unable or unwilling to bear the additional cost, would have driven rather than flown. And while proponents of safety seats are correct to point out that people who have children in their cars tend to drive more safely than the average motorist, even for careful drivers the risk of death is greater in a car than in a plane.16

1995-1996:WARNING! BOGUS PARTS

A second major scare the media promoted in 1995 likewise lacked a sense of proportion and got pinned on the FAA. Each year 26 million airplane parts are replaced, and every part must, by law, carry paperwork certifying that it has been manufactured in accordance with strict FAA standards. With such volume of activity it would be extraordinary if no corruption entered into the production and certification