JSX operates under a regulatory loophole that allows them to bypass TSA security and hire significantly less experienced pilots. It is easy to find articles with very different opinions on JSX than this one.
I would ask why a company operating the same planes and more total flight hour than a competitor should be able to bypass the same security requirements and hire pilots with half the flight hours. Same goes for Skywest Charter.
European airlines hire pilots with even fewer hours, but have similar accident rates.
There is still significant oversight for anyone operating aircraft commercially, and it doesn't seem like this poses a significant risk from that perspective.
If you're going to cite the "less experienced pilots" in the Colgan crash as the reason the FAA increased the flight hour requirement, it seems responsible to mention that the pilots in that crash satisfied the higher requirement too. (EDIT: I see you have now acknowledged this in a different reply. Thanks!)
Going by the statistical value of life, crash risk now contributes a truly negligible amount to the cost of flight. We shouldn't accept additional burdensome flight safety rules without quantitative arguments that they pass a cost-benefit test.
That's directly in the source I quoted, to be fair: "(This rule would not have influenced the crew in this accident, as both pilots held ATP certificates and had more than 1,500 hours of experience.)". This requirement was added after the Colgan crash, as a direct result of it, though.
This isn't about new regulation, it is about a company attempting to avoid existing regulation. I am sure you'd agree removal of regulations should go through the same sort of cost benefit analysis, and that regulations should be applied fairly to all parties.
> I am sure you'd agree removal of regulations should go through the same sort of cost benefit analysis
Definitely not. We should err toward freedom. If you don't have good reason to think that the benefits of a regulation outweigh the harms, it should absolutely be repealed.
Of course, in this particular case I think the cost-benefit analysis has been done, and the 1500 hour rule is net harm.
> and that regulations should be applied fairly to all parties.
Not in the way you mean. I think if we have a bad regulation that is applied arbitrarily to one of two competitors, the afflicted party should lobby for the regulation to be removed from themselves, not for it to be applied to their competitor. If someone can find a legal way around a bad law, they should do it. I want taxis to be more like Uber/Lyft, not the other way around, and I don't think Uber/Lyft and its drivers should be punished for the harm inflicted to taxi drivers (if any) by bad rules.
Then I have to disagree with you a bit. Freedom for an individual to risk their own life is fine - I don't want to legally compel anyone to take medicine that will save their life, or prevent them from taking supplements or diets that will kill them. This is a different category of freedom. Failures of air safety in manufacture, maintenance, and operation can and do kill innocent parties on the ground in crashes and in the air in collisions. This is not even so rare, in civilian aviation outside the US. And that is not even considering questions about the risk awareness of passengers.
In 2022 (per 100k flight hours), part 121 carriers had .112 accidents and .006 fatalities; part 135 carriers had 1.096 accidents and 0.103 fatalities; and general aviation had 5.336 accidents and .945 fatalities.
JSX's model was 10 times more likely to be in an accident and 18 times more likely to be fatal than major airlines. This was in line or better than any other year I looked at back to 2008, which is the earliest data the NTSB had.
Before I dug into the data, I was willing to accept this regulation might be have been an overreaction that should be relaxed. Having dug into it, I have come to the opposite conclusion, and I think that the FAA should remove the regulatory loophole JSX operates under.
> This is a different category of freedom. Failures of air safety in manufacture, maintenance, and operation can and do kill innocent parties on the ground in crashes and in the air in collisions.
The vast, vast majority of airline deaths are from people who are employees or paying passengers. "This could conceivably hurt a third party" is, when unquantified, a blank check to regulate anything. All activities have non-zero risk to third parties.
> JSX's model was 10 times more likely to be in an accident and 18 times more likely to be fatal than major airlines. This was in line or better than any other year I looked at back to 2008, which is the earliest data the NTSB had.
You're missing the part where you actually quantify the benefit. That involves taking the accident rate, computing an expected chance of death per passenger per flight (or mile or whatever), converting to dollars using the statistical value of life (~$10M in the US), and comparing that number to the ticket price. You'll find that for the major airlines it's <$1 per flight.
Just ask: how would you know when it was no longer worth it to spend more to drive the risk lower? Any argument of the form "this activity is 10x more dangerous than another activity" is incomplete if you don't know what the appropriate level of danger is for the other activity.
As an admitted non-expert, the loophole part seems to be in the interpretation of a 30 seat limit on charters under part 135, along with the Part 380 "public charter operator".
Okay, that is fair. But if you are a major or regional flying under part 121, it isn't quite fair for JSX to essentially pretend they are not scheduled. Maybe they 1500 hour rule should be relaxed for everyone. But JSX is flying the same planes at the same scale as other companies and presents the same risk to the general public. They should be regulated the same.
I would ask why a company operating the same planes and more total flight hour than a competitor should be able to bypass the same security requirements and hire pilots with half the flight hours. Same goes for Skywest Charter.
The rules they work around, in Part 121, were made stricter 15 years ago because of the Colgan crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407#Legacy that killed 49 people on the aircraft and one on the ground.