naberhausj

Absolutely true if you're renting a home, but I feel like people never address that most people are renting apartments. These have substantially lower operating costs.

Home buying/rental is a totally fair comparison, but I know several people whose main justification for buying a home, rather than continuing living in an apartment, was that they wanted to, "stop throwing their money away". Totally ignoring how home ownership is actually more costly than renting a suitable apartment.

Of course, I fully recognize their are a lot of advantages to home ownership. Some of which you already called out. However, I doubt those advantages are actually sufficient to justify a small, but significant, portion of home purchases.

I don't think the statistics would bear out there being any way to make driving safer per passenger mile than public transport.

I get what you're saying. The empirical evidence just doesn't agree AFAIK.

This is the same attitude as people who are afraid of commercial flying despite it being the single safest form of transport. I get it. But it's irrational.

You might not get stabbed, but driving is incredibly dangerous. Even just in terms of violence: road rage is tolerated to a large extent in America. The difference is that the news doesn't report even a small fraction of the traffic deaths in this country. In Iowa, the state I used to live in, around 300 people died every year from driving. I don't know a single one of those people despite their death being a tragedy. Whereas the stories you linked were broadcast coast to coast.

I think this is a good idea.

The only negative I can think of is that it will generally involve accepting and responding to clearances on short final. I think adding more tasks to that critical stage of flight probably increases danger a little. Especially for low time student pilots like myself. That's particularly relevant in the U.S. because we have a higher percentage of student and private pilots than most of the world.

Overall, though, I'm fully convinced this would be safer.

Anybody know what those of us in the remaining states can do to help push this forward? I've never contacted my local representatives before, but this is the kind of no-brainer change that I would love for us to finally enact.

There are many factors that could have contributed to this (airspace restrictions, turbulence, etc...), but usually altitudes are selected based on the prevailing winds. You want as strong of a tailwind, or at least as weak of a headwind as possible.

About the same as a transponder, I think. According to the FAA many weather balloons operate their transponders (if equipped at all) intermittently to preserve battery.

47 CFR 87.107 requires that radios transmitters in aircraft broadcast an identification number, and the allowed forms of identification aren't permissive enough for non-registered aircraft.

ADS-B out is still relatively new (especially in aviation terms) so I expect we'll see this continue to evolve.

I've also been on flights where they asked us to hurry, and then we (flight attendants included) sat and waited for other things to be completed. Not saying that was what you experienced, of course! Nor am I complaining. My understanding is that gate attendants get penalized if they're the reason the plane is held up, so I understand why they'd play it safe and hurry people.

I'd love to see some hard data on this (I've tried to find it in the past, but there's so much fluff about this subject)!

I'm a _somewhat_ frequent flyer (5-8 trips a year). I've never experienced a plane being delayed by the time it take passengers to enter/exit the plane. I have, however, experienced delays because the baggage handlers are still loading the plane.

For that reason, I've never understood the obsession with loading the plane quickly.