Without subscribing to, or agreeing with his solution to a safety issue, I find your response to it striking in that even someone with a vested interest in safety responds to it from a financial perspective. Just goes to show that “safety is number one” is nowhere near a true statement.
Oh, I agree. Bluntly, safety is never the number one priority, and hasn't ever been treated as such except as hyperbole.
While 121 flying is safety focused, money is interest #1, #2 and #3. If that wasn't the case, dispatch would be 1:1, not 1:12, we wouldn't defer critical systems, ATC would be well-staffed and well-funded, pilots would be restricted to eight hours of duty (not FDP, not flight time, but duty) max per day, non-extendible, and no less than half hour of that duty, paid, would be allocated for reviewing the flight plan with each other and dispatch. Training would include ample time in the sim to go over not just basic procedures but also contingency planning, "build a team" CRM, obscure situations to emphasize systems-level thinking and reinforce training, and ... I mean, basically the stuff we think when we think of astronaut stuff.
Flight training would be free, provided by some sort of independent union to preclude companies having leverage over the pilots, anybody in the crew would be able to call a "safety stand down" if they got that itchy feeling, weather routing would involve large-scale tactical weather radar overlays with individual cell direction, intensity and speed, with associated phenomena predicted and mapped. You wouldn't have two miles of separation between an arrival on 28R and a takeoff clearance on 1L.
Literally could go on for hours.
We talk about safety, but, at the end of the day, the resources necessary to strengthen the system preclude shareholders making Phat Stax, and so it's always, always a balancing act.
The reason I respond in that context in my initial reply is because there's an implicit bias in it that isn't responsive (in my view) to the socioeconomic reality of the situation, and it's a reflex response to basically "get rid of those stinky regionals."
