Not just a ton, and I'm only chiming in here because the numbers are staggering. In the case of e.g. a 747 it's something like 190 tons. 63,000 some odd gallons of fuel.

The fuel is also flammable, and the engines work by at the end of the day being on fire in a controlled manner. Having the fuel and engines hit the ground elsewhere from the occupants sounds like a good plan to me if you can manage a way to do it somehow.

But like half of airline fires have been caused by things in the cargo hold.

The cargo hold is typically under the passenger compartment.

So in reality, there’s a 50ish percent chance that the pilots are just saving their own life.

I don't think airplanes ever will be there. It's just too expensive to fly a plane, there's too much risk, it's never going to be boring to the level of a bus or train.

It could definitely be way closer than it is, though.

Boeing is gonna build the emergency jettison system with one sensor prone to misfiring

I'm sure technically we could build a plane like that but I don't think we're at a developmental level that would allow us to make them cheap and secure enough and to handle the logistics involved. Boeing is struggling to make normal planes safe and the entire flight control system in US is close to a breaking point. Imagine adding more possible failure points to the planes and more complex logistics at the airports...

That time is used by the ground crew to prepare the plane for the flight and go over safety systems. Planes can't just land and takeoff again immediately. Things can go wrong, and you can't pull over in the air. Sometimes those delays are mechanical, and some times those delays are shift changes, bad crew scheduling/staffing levels. Airports are pretty fucking efficient over all. From the planes flying people around perspective, not the human shuffling element. We are just cattle to them after all.

Or a mutant island full of cannibals.

If they’re all mutants they’d think I’m the one that looks messed up, so they’d avoid eating me like I was Blinky the fish

It might fall through a wormhole, and leap forward in time thousands of years, where Roddy McDowall clones dress up as apes and terrorize the populace. I mean nothing in physics disallows this, as far as I know.