Commercial flight in the US is incredibly safe - if I remember correctly, there have only been two commercial airliner deaths in the US since 2009 - the very famous Southwest flight from a few years ago where a passenger was killed (and nearly got pulled out through the window) and a less famous botched landing up in Alaska. I think one thing that you're missing, though, is that a lot of the reason that airline travel in the US is so safe is because not only do we take the safety seriously, we have built an incredible amount of redundancy in systems so that if one fails, there's another to "catch" it. As a result, we're not going to see a true breakdown in aviation until multiple layers of redundancy have been breached - and there certainly is danger intentionally creating "soft spots", which depend on the other redundancies to hold to allow for things to "pass".
Commercial flight in the US is incredibly safe - if I remember correctly, there have only been two commercial airliner deaths in the US since 2009 - the very famous Southwest flight from a few years ago where a passenger was killed (and nearly got pulled out through the window) and a less famous botched landing up in Alaska. I think one thing that you're missing, though, is that a lot of the reason that airline travel in the US is so safe is because not only do we take the safety seriously, we have built an incredible amount of redundancy in systems so that if one fails, there's another to "catch" it. As a result, we're not going to see a true breakdown in aviation until multiple layers of redundancy have been breached - and there certainly is danger intentionally creating "soft spots", which depend on the other redundancies to hold to allow for things to "pass".
Posted updated with your remarks and my response.
Post updated with your comments and my response.