

Flying Cheap - sailormoon
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/flyingcheap/

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pkulak
I watched this when it was on TV, and it was really interesting, but I
couldn't help but keep thinking that even if a plane fell out of the sky every
month, it would still be the safest way to travel by orders of magnitude.
Though, I guess the point is that improving safety should still be a goal,
even if you're the safest already.

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jerf
I've idly wondered a couple of times if the industry would be better off from
a PR POV if a plane went down every week. Right now a plane crash with
fatalities is NEWS with capital letters. This would make it ho-hum.

Then again, if you're averaging one down a week, statistically you'll probably
end up with a cluster of five or six+ planes going down within a day or two
and suddenly it would be news again, regardless of whether it was actually
statistically significant, so _shrug_

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olefoo
Wouldn't a zero-defects approach work better from a PR and a human
perspective?

Part of the reason driving seems much safer to most people is that usually
they have agency and are in control of the vehicle and can make their own
decisions about weather conditions and likely traffic patterns. Whereas in a
plane they are giving up control to someone unknown.

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jerf
Human perspective, no question! But the PR goal is to "not have bad news in
the news", basically. Zero crashes gets you there, but, regrettably, that's
basically impossible. More crashes would make a mere crash "not news". But,
like I said, probably wouldn't work anyhow. "An auto crash" isn't much news,
but bad enough things still happen that they still show up on the evening news
with some frequency.

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nym
Can someone provide a summary? At work on this Monday, and would like to know
if I should watch it later when I'm home.

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noodle
bigger, "reputable" commercial airlines contract out many of their flights to
lower quality and/or less experienced, no-name service providers in order to
save some $. this fact is hidden from the customer, as the ticket, plane,
boarding gate, etc. are still branded with the big company's logo.

this is a problem, because while the big company has certain quality standards
set, the smaller ones do not necessarily have to live up to those same
standards. and they usually don't, which is why they're so much cheaper.

