The Madness of Air Travel Regulation
If you’ve ever flown in a plane, you know the drill.
Listen for the upteenth time to the standard list of rules.
Watch a flight attendant show you how to buckle a seatbelt.
Stow your baggage completely under the seat in front of you.
Keep your seat upright, your tray table up, and your large electronics packed until the plane reaches cruising altitude.
Put your seat upright, your tray table up, and your large electronics away when the plane starts its descent.
And now, of course, keep your mask on at all times, except briefly for eating and drinking.
What’s the point of all these rules? If you Google, you’ll find some dogmatic condescending defenses of the status quo. But I can’t find a single piece that even mentions, much less deploys, cost-benefit analysis.* Instead, the defenders of the status quo just say that these are all “safety measures.” Hypothetical scenarios like, “What if you can’t escape from a burning plane because tray tables block your way?” are the closest thing they have to an argument. Followed by, “Better safe than sorry.”
Can the reasoning really be so insipid? Verily. Remember a few years back, when you couldn’t even use your small electronics during takeoff and landing? When that was the law of the land, here’s how one defender of the status quo justified it:
There was a lot of discussion about whether or not phones would interfere with the navigation equipment. No one has been able to prove that they do and nobody has been able to prove that they don't. Again at the moment, they are erring on the side of safety.
The truth is, the FAA doesn’t know for sure that cellular signals interfere with flight equipment. Theoretically, they could. That was enough for the ban, the FAA figured.
What’s the alternative to “erring on the side of safety”?
One is technocratic: Carefully measure safety benefits and convenience costs, and impose regulations if and only if the safety benefits exceed the convenience costs.
This would almost certainly end almost all of the regulations passengers endure. Why? Because air travel is so incredibly safe that even large percentage safety gains have little value. As the National Safety Council puts it:
Commercial scheduled air travel is among the safest modes of transportation; the 2020 lifetime odds of dying as an aircraft passenger in the United States were too small to calculate.
The other alternative to the status quo is consumer-driven: Let each airline set their own safety rules - and let the chips fall where they may. If consumers’ fear of flying on airplanes that land with trays down exceeds the the convenience of unlimited tray access, airlines will make you raise trays. Otherwise, tray’s the limit.
Due to public innumeracy, I’m not entirely confident that “letting the market decide” would torch the status quo. Still, people love convenience, and actions do speak louder than words. So I’d still predict that most of the rules would go away in a few years.
Why, though, does the status quo endure? Partly, it’s the same logic as the FDA: regulators personally suffer far more for underregulation than overregulation. No regulator will get a big promotion for making flying more convenient. But if deregulation causes a single media scandal, top regulators will face public humiliation and potential career devastation.
The deeper reason the inane status quo endures, though, is the dreadful fact that in politics, words speak louder than actions. Actions say that human beings love convenience. But rhetorically, convenience counts for almost nothing.
Upshot: When you hand power over to government, you don’t get numerate technocracy; you get the innumerate demagoguery that we’ve long endured. When you “let the market decide,” businesses can get rich by catering to innumerate consumers; see the organic food industry. But businesses can simultaneously get rich by catering to everyone else, too. Letting the market set airline travel standards wouldn’t be perfect, but it would put to shame the innumerate demagoguery we’ve long endured. Convenience now!
*I was however able to find one empirical cost-benefit analysis of airport security. Central result: “Fatality risks from terrorist attacks to airports are extremely low, and 100–1000 times less than acceptable risks.”
I mostly agree that many of the regulations are ridiculous, but I'm going to stand up for requiring tray tables to be stowed for takeoff and landing. I'm perhaps somewhat colored on the issue as a former airline pilot, but as you've hinted, the purpose of the regulation is to allow a quick evacuation. A survivable incident on takeoff or landing is often followed by an ugly fire that burns fast and hot. The FAA quite sensibly requires that aircraft manufacturers demonstrate that their aircraft can be evacuated in 90 seconds and this affects the design of everything from the seatbelts to the seats and the aisles.
Note that unless you're in a window seat, this isn't just a matter of your safety, but those in your row as well. If you're sitting in an aisle seat with your tray table down and your carry-on bag blocking my exit, you've needlessly endangered my life. The cost-benefit calculation is worthwhile but tricky: it costs you almost nothing to put up your tray table for a very small possibility of other people on the plane not dying a horrible death in a fire. I have no idea how to run such a calculation, but I'm sure you as an economist do. I'd love to see an impartial attempt at such an analysis.
Note that even in today's quite safe environment, fires do happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 I'm not sure they happen often enough for market forces to result in (a) aircraft that are designed to be evacuated in a reasonable amount of time, or (b) airlines to adopt a range of safety protocols that enable customers to make informed purchasing decisions on the basis of safety.
Airline travel is incredibly safe, but I attribute this almost exclusively to the harsh regulatory environment in which they operate. I don't have a lot of data here, but I do have some anecdotal data from my own career. I worked for a regional airline that constantly tried to cut corners in every department from crew training, to crew scheduling to maintenance. On multiple occasions I had to take a stance about not operating a flight in such a way that would violate FAA regulations. If I didn't have the backing of federal regulations (that in fact held me personally accountable as well as my employer), it's clear that I would have been fired. A typical instance is crew rest and my obligation to refuse flight assignments in violation of regulations which were *regularly* attempted by my airline in response to delays.
Random other notes: stowing your items for takeoff is also about more than evacuation safety. The laptop you'd like to have on your lap is going to depart violently for the front of the plane when a rejected takeoff results in maximum braking at 140mph. Chances are good it's going to hit someone when it does. I'm pretty sure you have no idea how quickly an aircraft going 140mph can decelerate, but the answer is fast.
Leaving your window shades open for takeoff and landing is about being able to see outside in order to know that you don't want to evacuate into a wing that's full of jet fuel and on fire.
That said, the TSA's regulations are absurd and clearly fail the most obvious cost/benefit analysis. The 9/11 hijacking problem was solved in half an hour with simple education. The impenetrable kevlar cockpit doors were a fantastic investment and finished solving the problem. Subjecting passengers to ionizing radiation, making them remove their shoes, taking away their shampoo and making them show proof of identification is all nonsense that should be stopped immediately.
Electronic devices: The FAA failed to do due diligence here in a timely manner. There was never a chance that your Kindle posed a problem. Cell phones on the other hand can be quite a nuisance!
As an airline pilot, I regularly experienced interference from mobile phones! It was mostly GSM band phones, and it was usually either the other pilot's or the flight attendants. Sometimes it was a passenger near the front of the plane. The interference manifests itself as a terrible intermittent noise over the radio that could and DID obfuscate audio enough that transmissions needed to be repeated. Modern mobile phones do not seem to be as prone to this interference. Note that your phone is also not going to work very well over about 10,000 feet anyway--so just put it in airplane mode to save the battery.