Comment by tjohns
2 years ago
How does seat-miles matter here at all? That's not a normal metric used in this field.
Using seat-miles leads to some very strange conclusions. Consider cargo aircraft with zero seats, or a helicopter that mostly hovers in place all day.
Aviation safety primarily looks at airframe hours and pressurization cycles. At least on the mechanical side.
Oh, you're right. I was thinking about it from the perspective of a passenger, like if you're just a regular non-crew person who travels, then you're probably on Boeing or Airbus, so I picked a metric that I thought would capture that angle, but it's a weird one to choose.
Like, you take up a seat, so if you were to randomly select a mile that you've traveled in your life, what are the odds that it was on a Boeing / Airbus or a regional jet? But, I think this wasn't really clear from what I wrote