American Airlines apparently has jets with an average age of 18 years old. Now given that they get maintained and rebuilt a bunch of time during their career, does the age of your airplane matter?
An interesting coalition of groups including the Teamsters and the Business Travel Coalition, have a real bee in their bonnet about where aircraft are maintained. They don't seem to like the fact that it is being done in Korea. Now I understand that the Teamsters worry more about domestic jobs, but why would people who represent corporate travel departments care? After all, many of their companies are busy outsourcing large chunks of work to low cost environments.
We seem to have great difficulty understanding that price does have an effect and that services do cost money. In this case, how much was paid for the ticket and how old is your airplane are related. I find this ironic - after all my corporate travel policy forces me to choose these carriers. They do so because the "discount" price they get off the "retail" fare means that I get to pay more as an individual when I fly so that the corporate travel folk can save money. But now they are surprised when the airlines do what they can to squeeze cost out of the equation so that they can offer "discounts" to "corporate customers".
But will it change our behaviour, let alone those of our corporate travel departments? Or in fact are we behaving like rational economic animals. After all, technical failure is only responsible for 20% of accidents and only 37.28% of accidents are commercial flights. 2007 was one of the safest years on record.
So if you are of nervous disposition - fly in Europe, fly on a jet. North America accounts for 32% of crashes. Hmm. Maybe the Teamsters have something after all.
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