Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!haven!decuac!netsys!vector!telecom-gateway From: stiatl!john@gatech.edu (John DeArmond) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Divestiture, Business and the General Public Message-ID: Date: 20 Aug 89 19:56:58 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Reply-To: John DeArmond Organization: Sales Technologies Inc., "The Procedure IS the product" Lines: 35 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us In article goudreau@rtp48.dg.com (Bob Goudreau) writes: >>Digression: airline deregulation is similarly bad. The benefits are >>lost in the enormously higher risks as airlines ignore safety (take >>Eastern Airlines, for example, (please?)). > >You picked a poor analogy by criticizing airline deregulation's effect >on safety. In fact, according to a recent article in the _Economist_, >the decline in accidents & deaths per US aviation passenger mile has >continued unabated, even throughout the past decade of deregulation. And as anyone who has looked below the surface of this subject knows, "deaths per passenger mile" is a completely bogus measurment which does not represent the true safety condition of modern air travel. As a larger and larger proportion of a carrier's fleet becomes high capacity jumbo-jets, the DPPM magically goes down even while the crash rate is up. A much truer representation is "deaths per VEHICLE mile". Even more representative than that would be "crash rate" in units of "crashes per vehicle mile". Rearrange the figures to fit into either of these models and the figures don't look so hot. Makes pedaling a bicycle on I-75 at rush hour look safe. As some immortal soul once said, "figures lie and liars figure". And you certainly don't expect the airline industry or FAA to arrange the lying so THEY look bad do you? Now back to your regularly scheduled telephone show :-) John -- John De Armond, WD4OQC | Manual? ... What manual ?!? Sales Technologies, Inc. Atlanta, GA | This is Unix, My son, You ...!gatech!stiatl!john **I am the NRA** | just GOTTA Know!!!