Quote:
Originally Posted by jbjb
The trouble is, it's staggeringly hard to quantify the risk.
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Possibly--probably--right. However, approximations may go a long way towards furthering the conversation, and may be much easier to calculate.
Again, there is existing empirical data from people using PEDs in flight over many years. Surely we can estimate the extent and types of usage (I know of at least one study that has done so). This data provides at least one way to quantify the risk in an approximate fashion, and doesn't strike me as "staggeringly hard."
I strongly suspect that regulators and businesses rely on approximations of similarly "staggeringly hard" problems all the time. Will releasing X product or feature subject us to crippling legal liability? Is Y safety regulation worth the burdens of oversight and compliance?
Another perspective: we now have wifi available on many flights. I am sure the wifi router devices had to undergo very thorough safety tests, but I am also sure they could not and did not test every possible wifi-enabled PED that could use the service. Yet this was deemed "safe enough" by the airlines and/or the regulators. Well, how did they go about measuring "safe enough"? Was this based on numbers, or something fuzzier? You could argue that the safety of wifi is also a "staggeringly hard" problem, yet they found a way to cut the Gordian knot.