Would you fly your family to Disney World aboard Brand X Airways in a rattletrap plane with ragged flaps and a sticky rudder that might or might not have flunked its last inspection?

Would you trust a stranger with a checkered driving record and a tendency to doze off at the wheel to chauffeur Grandma to a slot tourney across the state line?

You would not. And while the risk-ratio-to-overall-passenger-miles is small, it’s nearly impossible to calculate in the indifferently regulated charter bus business.

It wasn’t exactly an eye-popping surprise to learn that the Houston company that supplied the bus aboard which 17 people died in a North Texas crash Friday was out of compliance with established standards.

But it’s disquieting that a company with such an egregious history of indifference to its passengers’ safety was still merrily booking tours and making money right up until the catastrophe.

Can you imagine the furor that would erupt if the U.S. government shut down an airline – even a little regional charter service – for “grossly deficient” aircraft maintenance? For an “ineffective or nonexistent inspection, repair and maintenance program” that led to a fatal crash that killed 17 people?

We would all, with good reason, be howling with outrage that a company so callously negligent had even been able to operate.

Well, I’m howling with outrage over this one. Angel Tours shouldn’t have been in business when trusting passengers bound for a religious retreat in Missouri pulled out of Houston aboard two buses.

One of them later ran off an overpass near Sherman, rolling down a hillside and crushing the unsecured people inside like loose saltines in a box.

There’s an ongoing debate in the commercial bus industry over whether seatbelts should be provided (astonishing as it is, you can get a ticket for not buckling up in your car, but you can’t belt in on most buses even if you want to).

There’s an ongoing effort to require specially treated bus windows that would help keep passengers from being thrown out through the glass in an accident.

Serious questions, but too many operators in this industry aren’t even bothering to observe the safety standards that are already required. Seatbelts would be good – but so would stopping the practice of putting drivers like Ernest Carter behind the wheel.

The late Mr. Carter was the sleep-deprived driver who crashed a busload of campers from a Garland church into a bridge abutment near Terrell in 2002, killing himself and four of his young passengers, and permanently disabling several others.

At the time of the crash, he had a long record of serious traffic violations, a sloppily altered medical certificate, traces of Valium and cocaine in his blood, and no sleep since his previous cross-country trip.

It’s not especially difficult to get a commercial driving license. A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found thousands of licensees who are entitled to full federal disability benefits – including bus and truck drivers with such serious medical conditions as blackouts, epilepsy and sleep apnea.

How many working commercial pilots do you suppose are prone to blackouts?

Obviously, it’s tough for regulators to keep up, especially in an environment where anybody with a couple of ramshackle buses can start up a backyard charter service.

But the avoidable circumstances of unfit drivers and unsound vehicles seems to be a hallmark of too many commercial bus tragedies.

After the 2002 wreck, our editorial board wrote: “Mr. Carter was at the wheel of that bus because there aren’t enough people enforcing the rules.”

Six years later, not much seems to have changed.