Squawk:
How much does it replace to cost a life? Oh wait... you can’t!
I can see the day when aircraft are given ancap style ratings and airbags like in a Cirrus become standard equipment. Even the A330 has airbags on selected seats seatbelts.
75% of fatalities in motor vehicles in Victoria last year, were in vehicles 10 years or older. The average age of vehicles in Australia is circa 10.2 years. 25% of fatalities in Victoria this year were persons not wearing seat belts. That figure could be a lot higher as many were undetermined.
Safety features do actually save lives!
Again showing your excellent grasp of statistics and cost benefit analysis(not).
1. Insurance companies have these professional employees called actuaries. Their job is precisely to put a cost on peoples lives, a process that happens every time an insurance premium is computed. This is obviously unknown to you. I include the Wiki reference for you.
2. By your simple and incorrect logic, we should all be wearing crash helmets and have our cars fitted with four point harnesses and roll cages. Obviously we don't, so that should have triggered the thought that perhaps something else is going on here. Pity it didn't.
3. That "something else" is called risk management which involves cost benefit analysis. The billions in materials and lost time involved in making all cars and drivers adopt Bathurst race safety standards outweigh the cost of the vehicle accidents. The converse - we wear mandatory bicycle helmets, cheap protection from serious and frequent injury.
4. As for "ancap style " safety ratings, dream on. We don't have enough data.
5. Then there is the problem of "risk shifting" which is code for people doing dumb things in Cirrus aircraft because they thought the parachute would save them.
What can perhaps be said is that
if the ATSB can
prove that there is a
measureable improvement in safety to back seat passengers which would result in the saving of "x" lives or serious injuries costing "Z" dollars,
and the total cost of implementing such safety measures is less than "Z" on a discounted cash flow basis, then it makes sense to do it. My guess is it doesn't.
As for road fatalities versus vehicle age. You fail to understand that correlation does not imply causation.
Lest anyone think these are new ideas specific to cars and aircraft, the horse era had its own set of accidents and attempts at mitigation. Then there was Samuel Plimsoll.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correl...mply_causation