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>FAA for pushing engineers to 'delegate' reviews of certain components back to Boeing themselves. How much more proof do we need as a society that self regulat

>FAA for pushing engineers to 'delegate' reviews of certain components back to Boeing themselves. How much more proof do we need as a society that self regulation is a fool's errand?

ineedasername 8y ago
Unfortunately, regulation doesn't fit with the narrative of self-determination and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" Instead the narrative is about big, bloated bureaucracies, ignoring the fact that they got so big by having to respond and add additional layers every time someone figured out a new way to screw things up, as with Boeing.
- dmix 8y ago
  I've never heard anyone criticizing the size of the FAA or calls for airplane manufacturers to be deregulated. Do you have examples of this? Or are you just making a general politicized point about deregulation? On the other hand I've seen many people complain about "regulatory capture" between FAA + Boeing repeatedly. That's even on the Wikipedia for FAA. > The FAA has been cited as an example of regulatory capture, "in which the airline industry openly dictates to its regulators its governing rules, arranging for not only beneficial regulation, but placing key people to head these regulators." Which is an entirely different problem than a culture of "pulling up your bootstraps". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Administratio...
  - ineedasername 8y ago
    Yes, I have an example. The parent comment was about regulation in general, and mine was in response to that. However, there was the massive deregulation of the FAA in 1978 due to this sort of pressure. It had one effect of creating more competition in the industry, but it arguably went too far and has had an impact on safety as well. [0] [0] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/perspective-on-airline-safety-deregulation-increases-risk/ https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/perspective-on-airline-sa...
    - briandear 8y ago
      I am not sure if you know what you are talking about. The FAA can’t be “deregulated” as it is the regulatory body. And the airline deregulation that happened in ‘78 was deregulation of airline routes, not airline safety requirements. Furthermore, that 1996 Brookings opinion; that hasn’t held up very well considering that US aviation has an extraordinary safety record since that time and an even better record than during the regulated days. More people are killed by trains every year than die in commercial airliners, but are we suggesting that train regulation is deficient? About 16 people a week are killed by trains in the US, yet with commercial airliners in the US, we’ve had a just single fatality since 2009. By any measure, the FAA and industry have done an exceptional job of keeping the American flying public safe.
      - ineedasername 8y ago
        I think you're cherry picking and looking for reasons for me to be wrong because you don't like my conclusion. The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and FAA were closely affiliated agencies until the '78 deregulation, and in the wake of it the FAA picked up some of the CAB's former duties. The CAB was deregulated out of existence. And simply saying the Brooking's opinion isn't relevant isn't actually a supporting argument. Neither is stating that trains have more deaths: so do cars, but neither point is relevant to whether or not airplane safety was damaged by deregulation. Besides which, I think your estimate misses the much higher casualty rates among private aircraft, which do in fact rival cars [0] The question has little to do with whether the FAA has done a good job, it's about what happened after the deregulation, and whether it would be even better without it. [0] https://www.livescience.com/49701-private-planes-safety.html https://www.livescience.com/49701-private-planes-safety.html
  - knz 8y ago
    > I've never heard anyone criticizing the size of the FAA or calls for airplane manufacturers to be deregulated. Do you have examples of this? Numerous aspects of the FAA have been politicized for decades (going back to at least the ATC strike under Reagan). The FAA also has a number of complex and lengthy programs (https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/ https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/ etc) that are have drawn extensive criticism from Congress, industry, and airport operators due to the cost, delays, and scope of proposed regulation etc. Even FAA reauthorization is a politically contentious issue.
    - dmix 8y ago
      Projects tend to be fair game to criticism for failing to meet goals after funding. My question was about examples of airline manufacturers getting "deregulated"? Particularly top-down pressure from congress related to aircraft safety at the manufacturer level (rather than the aircraft manufacturers getting special treatment from the FAA or freely gaming the system - by bypassing protocols of "new" plane models without any pressure from the regulatory body).
  - rconti 8y ago
    The article specifically cited funding cuts at the FAA.
    - dmix 8y ago
      Great, lets hope congress now has the incentivize to properly analyze the incident and determine if a lack of adequate resources was the source of the problem and then acts on it. Regulation for regulations sake (as in telling the public it's "regulated" by pointing to current scale and existing policymaking, while in reality it is not having the intended effect) is even worse than having no regulation at all. The current congressional majority is hardly composed on the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" types being blamed by the GP. At least in terms of rhetoric and campaign platitudes they are known. Even among a significant percentage of the republicans camp is far from fitting into the anti-government oversight camp. The article mentions of a lack of "funding" but I haven't been able to find any evidence where funding for aircraft safety has been reduced in the last few decades. If there was a crisis of funding, where new planes aren't getting sufficient oversight or controls, then this regulatory body have either failed to make it a public issue, shutdown whistleblowers, or (more likely) it's a failure of regulatory capture and/or the monopoly-esque companies have learned how to navigate the political system (checking the right checkboxes) without any disincentives for doing so.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    See: personal drones.
    - dmix 8y ago
      Drone hobbyists are calling for airplanes to be deregulated?
- linuxftw 8y ago
  The free market answer would be insurance. As an individual, you probably want some kind of life insurance in the event of catastrophe. Your insurance carrier may require you only ride in such and such certified aircraft (eg, an aircraft that is insured against loss of life). An aircraft may only obtain insurance if it meets certain requirements, etc. Unfortunately, we've got a regulatory body asleep at the wheel, telling people things are safe when they're not. This is distorting the insurance marketplace. In a system with regulations, there has to be some meaningful method of enforcing penalties, and IMO this is particularly needed in the are of liability. It shouldn't matter if Boeing got a defective part from a manufacturer, or bad software, or what have you from a 3rd party. It's still their primary responsibility to ensure safe travels. If that means certifying each and every nut and bolt that comes into their supply chain, then so be it. $50m per dead passenger should be a suitable amount. We'll see just how confident they are in this MCAS and all this automation nonsense then.
  - ineedasername 8y ago
    Looking back a hundred or more years when the market was more free, your vision of how things might work does not hold. There were no insurance markets for potential injury due to riding a horse, no private certification of stables that lent horses to ensure animals were fit and free of issues of temperament that might cause them to throw a rider. The free market is not a panacea that solves every problem. It does solve some problems. Arguably for a very long time some degree of freedom has been better than the alternative of centrally controlled economies, but that doesn't mean that no better alternative or balance of the forces exists.
    - chrismeller 8y ago
      A horse was also a much less complex animal (literally) than a 737. Using that as a justification for the lack of an insurance market is just wrong...
      - CamperBob2 8y ago
        I don't know about that. We could build 737s 50 years ago, but no one has yet built a horse.
MockObject 8y ago
If we're discussing a failure of the FAA, that's the right context to bash regulation, not "self regulation".
- wnevets 8y ago
  That is misleading at best. The FAA was instructed to let the industry to regulate itself more, a typical republican/libertarian belief. Boeing being allowed to self regulated created this mess. https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2019/03/18/did-trump-executive-orders-further-weaken-faa-oversight/#7890990a3ca7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2019/03/18/did-tru... >Still, the US DOT mandated that the FAA begin the process of review to reduce regulations. The FAA assigned this task to ARAC, effectively putting the question of what rules to cut and which to eliminate before creating new ones in the hands of a body that includes representatives from manufacturers and airlines.
  - MockObject 8y ago
    But an inherent bug of government regulation is that it's always vulnerable to lobbying like you cited. So it's still a failure of regulation, except one that is permanent and unsurprising.
    - wnevets 8y ago
      Are you arguing that it was a failure of the government regulation by allowing the self regulation that caused the mess?
      - MockObject 8y ago
        Yes. If a suspect nicely asks a police officer not to arrest them, and the officer complies, that's a failure of policing. The only difference here is that the vulnerability of regulatory bodies to asking nicely is so well-recognized that it has a fancy name ("Regulatory Capture"), and is backed by loads of published research, and quite frankly is probably the reason that the business class even submits to this sort of regulation at all.
briandear 8y ago
How many 737s crashed while under FAA jurisdiction? The US has had one commercial airliner fatality since 2009, so it would seem that the FAA is doing something right. Maybe Kenya and Indonesia need some improvements?
- briandear 8y ago
  Why is this downvoted? It’s a fact. The FAA doesn’t regulate the training, maintenance or competency of Indonesia or Kenya. Under FAA regulations, the copilot on the Kenya crash would have never been allowed to fly: he had just 200 total hours. So somehow that’s the FAA’s fault?
  - sctb 8y ago
    > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cmurf 8y ago
  In effect two, because the countries in which crashes occurred deferred to the FAA certification rather than require their own, as compared to Brazil. And what's Kenya got to do with this topic?
sctb 8y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19422650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19422650.

>FAA for pushing engineers to 'delegate' reviews of certain components back to Boeing themselves. How much more proof do we need as a society that self regulation is a fool's errand?

ineedasername 8y ago

Unfortunately, regulation doesn't fit with the narrative of self-determination and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" Instead the narrative is about big, bloated bureaucracies, ignoring the fact that they got so big by having to respond and add additional layers every time someone figured out a new way to screw things up, as with Boeing.

dmix 8y ago
I've never heard anyone criticizing the size of the FAA or calls for airplane manufacturers to be deregulated. Do you have examples of this? Or are you just making a general politicized point about deregulation? On the other hand I've seen many people complain about "regulatory capture" between FAA + Boeing repeatedly. That's even on the Wikipedia for FAA. > The FAA has been cited as an example of regulatory capture, "in which the airline industry openly dictates to its regulators its governing rules, arranging for not only beneficial regulation, but placing key people to head these regulators." Which is an entirely different problem than a culture of "pulling up your bootstraps". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Administratio...
- ineedasername 8y ago
  Yes, I have an example. The parent comment was about regulation in general, and mine was in response to that. However, there was the massive deregulation of the FAA in 1978 due to this sort of pressure. It had one effect of creating more competition in the industry, but it arguably went too far and has had an impact on safety as well. [0] [0] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/perspective-on-airline-safety-deregulation-increases-risk/ https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/perspective-on-airline-sa...
  - briandear 8y ago
    I am not sure if you know what you are talking about. The FAA can’t be “deregulated” as it is the regulatory body. And the airline deregulation that happened in ‘78 was deregulation of airline routes, not airline safety requirements. Furthermore, that 1996 Brookings opinion; that hasn’t held up very well considering that US aviation has an extraordinary safety record since that time and an even better record than during the regulated days. More people are killed by trains every year than die in commercial airliners, but are we suggesting that train regulation is deficient? About 16 people a week are killed by trains in the US, yet with commercial airliners in the US, we’ve had a just single fatality since 2009. By any measure, the FAA and industry have done an exceptional job of keeping the American flying public safe.
    - ineedasername 8y ago
      I think you're cherry picking and looking for reasons for me to be wrong because you don't like my conclusion. The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and FAA were closely affiliated agencies until the '78 deregulation, and in the wake of it the FAA picked up some of the CAB's former duties. The CAB was deregulated out of existence. And simply saying the Brooking's opinion isn't relevant isn't actually a supporting argument. Neither is stating that trains have more deaths: so do cars, but neither point is relevant to whether or not airplane safety was damaged by deregulation. Besides which, I think your estimate misses the much higher casualty rates among private aircraft, which do in fact rival cars [0] The question has little to do with whether the FAA has done a good job, it's about what happened after the deregulation, and whether it would be even better without it. [0] https://www.livescience.com/49701-private-planes-safety.html https://www.livescience.com/49701-private-planes-safety.html
- knz 8y ago
  > I've never heard anyone criticizing the size of the FAA or calls for airplane manufacturers to be deregulated. Do you have examples of this? Numerous aspects of the FAA have been politicized for decades (going back to at least the ATC strike under Reagan). The FAA also has a number of complex and lengthy programs (https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/ https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/ etc) that are have drawn extensive criticism from Congress, industry, and airport operators due to the cost, delays, and scope of proposed regulation etc. Even FAA reauthorization is a politically contentious issue.
  - dmix 8y ago
    Projects tend to be fair game to criticism for failing to meet goals after funding. My question was about examples of airline manufacturers getting "deregulated"? Particularly top-down pressure from congress related to aircraft safety at the manufacturer level (rather than the aircraft manufacturers getting special treatment from the FAA or freely gaming the system - by bypassing protocols of "new" plane models without any pressure from the regulatory body).
- rconti 8y ago
  The article specifically cited funding cuts at the FAA.
  - dmix 8y ago
    Great, lets hope congress now has the incentivize to properly analyze the incident and determine if a lack of adequate resources was the source of the problem and then acts on it. Regulation for regulations sake (as in telling the public it's "regulated" by pointing to current scale and existing policymaking, while in reality it is not having the intended effect) is even worse than having no regulation at all. The current congressional majority is hardly composed on the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" types being blamed by the GP. At least in terms of rhetoric and campaign platitudes they are known. Even among a significant percentage of the republicans camp is far from fitting into the anti-government oversight camp. The article mentions of a lack of "funding" but I haven't been able to find any evidence where funding for aircraft safety has been reduced in the last few decades. If there was a crisis of funding, where new planes aren't getting sufficient oversight or controls, then this regulatory body have either failed to make it a public issue, shutdown whistleblowers, or (more likely) it's a failure of regulatory capture and/or the monopoly-esque companies have learned how to navigate the political system (checking the right checkboxes) without any disincentives for doing so.
- tracker1 8y ago
  See: personal drones.
  - dmix 8y ago
    Drone hobbyists are calling for airplanes to be deregulated?
linuxftw 8y ago
The free market answer would be insurance. As an individual, you probably want some kind of life insurance in the event of catastrophe. Your insurance carrier may require you only ride in such and such certified aircraft (eg, an aircraft that is insured against loss of life). An aircraft may only obtain insurance if it meets certain requirements, etc. Unfortunately, we've got a regulatory body asleep at the wheel, telling people things are safe when they're not. This is distorting the insurance marketplace. In a system with regulations, there has to be some meaningful method of enforcing penalties, and IMO this is particularly needed in the are of liability. It shouldn't matter if Boeing got a defective part from a manufacturer, or bad software, or what have you from a 3rd party. It's still their primary responsibility to ensure safe travels. If that means certifying each and every nut and bolt that comes into their supply chain, then so be it. $50m per dead passenger should be a suitable amount. We'll see just how confident they are in this MCAS and all this automation nonsense then.
- ineedasername 8y ago
  Looking back a hundred or more years when the market was more free, your vision of how things might work does not hold. There were no insurance markets for potential injury due to riding a horse, no private certification of stables that lent horses to ensure animals were fit and free of issues of temperament that might cause them to throw a rider. The free market is not a panacea that solves every problem. It does solve some problems. Arguably for a very long time some degree of freedom has been better than the alternative of centrally controlled economies, but that doesn't mean that no better alternative or balance of the forces exists.
  - chrismeller 8y ago
    A horse was also a much less complex animal (literally) than a 737. Using that as a justification for the lack of an insurance market is just wrong...
    - CamperBob2 8y ago
      I don't know about that. We could build 737s 50 years ago, but no one has yet built a horse.

MockObject 8y ago

If we're discussing a failure of the FAA, that's the right context to bash regulation, not "self regulation".

wnevets 8y ago
That is misleading at best. The FAA was instructed to let the industry to regulate itself more, a typical republican/libertarian belief. Boeing being allowed to self regulated created this mess. https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2019/03/18/did-trump-executive-orders-further-weaken-faa-oversight/#7890990a3ca7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2019/03/18/did-tru... >Still, the US DOT mandated that the FAA begin the process of review to reduce regulations. The FAA assigned this task to ARAC, effectively putting the question of what rules to cut and which to eliminate before creating new ones in the hands of a body that includes representatives from manufacturers and airlines.
- MockObject 8y ago
  But an inherent bug of government regulation is that it's always vulnerable to lobbying like you cited. So it's still a failure of regulation, except one that is permanent and unsurprising.
  - wnevets 8y ago
    Are you arguing that it was a failure of the government regulation by allowing the self regulation that caused the mess?
    - MockObject 8y ago
      Yes. If a suspect nicely asks a police officer not to arrest them, and the officer complies, that's a failure of policing. The only difference here is that the vulnerability of regulatory bodies to asking nicely is so well-recognized that it has a fancy name ("Regulatory Capture"), and is backed by loads of published research, and quite frankly is probably the reason that the business class even submits to this sort of regulation at all.

briandear 8y ago

How many 737s crashed while under FAA jurisdiction? The US has had one commercial airliner fatality since 2009, so it would seem that the FAA is doing something right. Maybe Kenya and Indonesia need some improvements?

briandear 8y ago
Why is this downvoted? It’s a fact. The FAA doesn’t regulate the training, maintenance or competency of Indonesia or Kenya. Under FAA regulations, the copilot on the Kenya crash would have never been allowed to fly: he had just 200 total hours. So somehow that’s the FAA’s fault?
- sctb 8y ago
  > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
cmurf 8y ago
In effect two, because the countries in which crashes occurred deferred to the FAA certification rather than require their own, as compared to Brazil. And what's Kenya got to do with this topic?

sctb 8y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19422650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19422650.