Safety isn't binary. The only way to achieve total aircraft safety is to have no aircraft. If the FAA literally cared about nothing other than safety they woul

Safety isn't binary. The only way to achieve total aircraft safety is to have no aircraft. If the FAA literally cared about nothing other than safety they would have everything grounded, so clearly they do to some extent care about other things. Plausibly, a well-designed government would be explicit about the tradeoffs between safety and convenience and cost and so forth. In practice, that might be politically catastrophic. What usually happens, I think, is something like this: the official line is "keep risk down to a negligible level", where "negligible" is usually not quantified, and cost/inconvenience is largely ignored until everyone agrees that the risk has been made negligible, but below that threshold everyone's free to minimize cost/inconvenience. (This might actually end up being a pretty good strategy. Let's measure cost and convenience in dollars, because trading those off against one another isn't so problematic; then maybe a reasonable approximation to what we care about is that 1. each death is like burning $X where X is probably some number of millions, and 2. having any major accident in a given year is like burning $Y where Y is many billions, because if there's a major accident then the hit to public confidence means (a) big loss to the airline industry, (b) more people driving instead of flying, which means more deaths because flying is much safer, and wasting a lot of their time, and probably also more environmental damage. In that case, maybe the effect of #2 is actually not so very different from "big penalty if the risk goes above a negligible level". But it seems like we'd get better decisions overall by being more explicit about what we care about and how much.)