Politics and the nature of risk assessment

There's a thread on Samizdata about Aircraft Regulation... them being good Libertarians and all, they're discussing the number of regulators who can dance on the head of a pin approach to handling aircraft and flying regulation.  Naturally, also being good Libertarians, they're complaining about how the state shouldn't be involved in this...

The logic, such that there is, goes like this: people should make their own decisions about the risk of flying on a certain airline, besides pilots won't fly on unsafe airlines...

There's more than a few problems with this, but I'll point out some of the obvious.  

Firstly, for your consideration, my all time "favourite" aircrash in recent years - Alaska Airlines 261.  This is a doozy for several reasons.  You've a type of aircraft I dislike flying in (MD80); you've highly experience pilot and first officer with tens of thousands of flight hours between them; you've an airline with a reasonable safety record; you've a passenger manifest including many senior airline managers and their families; and you've 30+ minutes of an aircraft flying in SERIOUS, MOTHER-F*&KING distress.  

The cockpit voice recorder is chilling ("Do you want to tell them what's happening then?", "Hell no, but I'd better" through to the final "We're inverted!", "Yeah, but I can still fly upside down..." EOT.  Oh, and you've a bunch of air traffic in the area around LAX with eyeballs on the last 15 minutes of the flight...)

In fact, many of the factors that our friends in Liber-World would suggest shouldn't come together but in fact did.

What transpired was simple.  Aircraft maintenance services at Seattle took a call on the lubrication schedule for the jackscrew which controls the main elevator on an MD-80 and to cut a long story short, it failed.  The really cool thing, from a risk assessment perspective, was that the pilots didn't know about the change, and the engineering crews didn't think it mattered - in fact the first part of the air-crash transcript is about the engineering team in Seattle trying to get the crippled and doomed flight to carry on up the coast and land at SeaTac because they didn't think it was all that a big deal and an out of service aircraft would be a problem for the schedule.

So, the libertarian logic that the experts wouldn't take risks has failed right out of the gate because even the people with the information didn't know enough about the problem to take an accurate call on what to do about it.  

Second: the idea is that individuals could chose to fly on airlines without certs and insurance of their own volition, one assumes because they can take a call on the nature of the risk they are adopting, is deeply flawed.  Unless something dramatically changes in Liber-World around the nature of Tort Law - I suspect that would last about as long as it took a mediocre legal team (you wouldn't need a great one for this) to prove to a jury that the passengers involved in the "choice" were not accurately informed about the nature of the risk they were taking.

Finally: this all assumes we need to test a hypothesis of what happens when you relax aircraft and airline regulation and don't maintain standards.  It was tried in the US, briefly, except an embarrassingly large number of planes crashed during the deregulation experiment.  It's also tried all over the world in poor countries without the money to implement such safety standards and, guess what? Relatively speaking a lot of planes crash.  Yes, rich western flag and primary carriers do crash - Air France has lost 2 aircraft in the last 10 years, United have lost one aircraft - but the numbers don't really stack up.

But the bit that really does it for me is the idea that there's always an "evil" (tm) government behind all this regulation.  Let's look at that bastion of "statism" the United Kingdom - they of the Private Airports...  There's this body called the Civil Aviation Authority that's responsible for aircraft licensing standards, aircraft ownership tracking and the like...  funny thing...  they're actually a non-government body, yes they're mandated by national law - but the organisation is actually paid for by the members...

I'm glad they're there.  And I'm glad they have the force of national law behind them...  I am amused that Libertarians don't seem to have noticed though.