Jet Flight, Mail Bags, And Banking Regulation, Federal Reserve Vice Chair For Supervision Randal K. Quarles, At The Prudential Regulation Conference (Via Webcast)
Date
03/06/2021
As many of you know, I am speaking to you from Salt Lake City, which, among its myriad other virtues, was the home of one of the earliest passenger airlines—Western Air Express, which ran its first passenger flight in the spring of 1926: Eight hours in a Douglas M2 between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, with one stop in Las Vegas for fuel. Two of the first passengers sat on the mail sacks in the back, and those early plane travelers were adventurers in other ways as well. That year there were 12 fatal commercial airplane crashes and that number rose to 59 a year by 1930. That's not total deaths—that's fatal crashes, with many people on each plane. Comparing hours flown and number of flights, that would be as if we had 7,000 fatal airplane crashes in a typical year today, with hundreds of thousands dead.