Today I read about an LAX to Tokyo flight that turned around after four hours because one of the passengers was unauthorized. He had a ticket and boarding pass for a different LAX to Tokyo flight, and somehow got on the wrong plane. The airline talked about an “out of the abundance of caution and safety for the passengers and crew” in the decision to return to the originating airport, rather than proceed on to Tokyo and resolve the issue there. Better safe than sorry; you can’t be too careful, right?
Except, returning to LAX wasn’t ‘free’; by flying extra miles, it actually added risk and decreased the safety of the passengers. Airline travel is incredibly safe, but there are risks. So, what was the rough cost of returning to LAX? Basically, instead of a single 11 hour flight, they effectively had an 11 hour flight plus an 8 hour flight. I’m just looking for the incremental cost of that 8 hour flight.
- The odds of dying in a plane crash are remarkably low: 1 in 11 million flights. The airline’s decision added another flight, so the incremental cost is 1 death in 11,000,000
- Long-haul flights increase exposure to radiation. A handy calculator tells me that an extra 6 hours at 39,000 feet (assuming an hour each for assent and descent) results in 0.03564 millisieverts of radiation. This increases your chance of getting cancer by 0.000237%, or 1 in 422,000. Cancer doesn’t kill you right away (or at all in some cases). Let’s assume it cuts your remaining lifespan in half. So the extra radiation costs 1/844,000th of your life (1 in 422,000, times half a life).
- The risk of Deep Vein Thrombosis during long flight is real, but I have no idea how to asses the additional risk in this case. So I’ll ignore it for now.
- The passengers eventually got to Tokyo, 15 hours later than scheduled. You could argue that 15 hours were stolen from their lives. Now, it wasn’t as if that time was completely wasted – they were able to read, watch videos, etc. But it certainly wasn’t how they would have chosen to spend that time. Let’s count 1/3 of that time (5 hours) as wasted. The average American is 38 years old, with a life expectancy of 46 more years. Losing five hours out of 46 years is one 80,600th of a life.
Add it all up, it’s .0000137 of a life, for each passenger. Multiply that by the number of passengers on the flight (226), and you get .0031, which is basically 1/320th of a life. Was it worth it? It isn’t clear to me how heading back to LA made the flight any safer. My problem is that they act as if there wasn’t any cost to what they did. If the airlines really had an “abundance of caution and safety for the passengers and crew”, they wouldn’t go throwing away non-trivial fractions of their lives.
