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If you're wondering - hey, that sounds terrible, why doesn't the FAA do anything about it? Answer, because it practically can't without maybe a 10x or more budg

If you're wondering - hey, that sounds terrible, why doesn't the FAA do anything about it? Answer, because it practically can't without maybe a 10x or more budget boost that's practically impossible. Why? Copying from another comment I made on this thread: (Caution, my thoughts are a bit rambly and scattered. It's been a while since I studied this in detail for a class where I had deep divided into the max 8 crash and FAA's lapse, so the details are a bit foggy.) The short answer is that unfortunately it's practically almost impossible to do this any other way, short of massively increasing funding for the FAA (which is presumably politically not going to be done.) The long answer is, anyone with expertise ends up going to work at an aerospace company where they are properly compensated. You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc. (This isn't unique to just aviation btw but most industries where you need a high level of technical expertise.) And if you think it should be easily doable... here's a thought experiment. Say 20 people in boeing know about MCAS (pre crashes and their publicity). If even only 2 FAA employees need to be technically sound in their knowledge of such a niche system, that's about 10% of how many boeing employees know about it. Now if you extrapolate that to all systems and all employees across multiple companies... you see why it's an issue for one agencies to have such deep knowledge about everything. (And this isn't even considering what happens when people quit etc.) Because of this, the most obvious answer to "how does the FAA, without much engineers, decide what's safe or not", is to ask the experts and just have them certify stuff, well, not under oath, but as close to that as possible.

NooneAtAll3 1y ago
how long ago did this self-certifying practice start? how much smaller was Boeing (and the whole aviation industry) back then?
- hooskerdu 1y ago
  Unit membership for manufacturing started with the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, but I’m not sure how involved or hands-off it was at the time.
dehrmann 1y ago
> This isn't unique to just aviation btw but most industries Most of us work in tech. Imagine an auditor coming in and trying to sort out if one of the most complex systems at your company is "safe." What's safe? Every previously known failure mode and every new one you're going to be blamed for when it happens.
- xdfgh1112 1y ago
  That's literally the security industry and third party security assessments are routine in tech.
  - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    Having been in both in software/IT capacities, having done PCI certified software, medical device software (requiring FDA approval), no. Not even close. MAYBE, MAYBE the insurance company assessments/audits are kind of related to what you are talking about. But not really. But not the FAA ones. They are such a different beast with so much brain power involved along with people with a combined centuries of experience in this stuff, it's hard to explain without being around it.
  - watwut 1y ago
    Yeah, but security industry is mostly a joke full of fraudsters. There are parts of it that work well, but most of it is theater and not that much competence. Which is fine for low states they deal with and not fine with planes.
- hgomersall 1y ago
  It's not about declaring things to be safe. It's about having documented and adhered to processes that show safety is taken seriously at every point in the design, manufacture and maintenance of safety critical systems.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  I thought FDA regulated device software certification was hard, PCI certification just annoying. FAA certification is on another level from those. There's so many moving parts to aircraft certification honestly I was surprised when a new design would get type design certification. Which is why Boeing tries to do things like shoehorn in a new airplane under an older airplane type design (MAX) so they don't have to get a whole new type design approved.
jjav 1y ago
> If you're wondering - hey, that sounds terrible, why doesn't the FAA do anything about it? Answer, because it practically can't without maybe a 10x or more budget boost that's practically impossible. You're correct in that the FAA can't (or at least, it would be wildly impractical) have a staff of in-house experts that equal or exceed the experience of the manufacturer engineers on every possible topic. But, that's not necessary to enforce a process of quality. It can be done by enforcing that the company must establish and document the processes to ensure quality, including which experts need to sign off on what. Then the FAA needs to hold the engineers who sign off professionally responsible and their managment legally liable if any circumvention is discovered down the line.
- M95D 1y ago
  > It can be done by enforcing that the company must establish and document the processes to ensure quality You have no ideea. It's sooo extremely easy to fake everything! I'm working with ISO15189 right now. I could just fill paperwork saying I did things that I didn't really do. Nobody could tell the difference. Sometimes there's an audit. It's announced months in advance and they only just look at the paperwork. I'm the only one here that knows the analysers have trace logs and how do get/print them. Some of those logs are just CSV text files. I could fake those too. According to ISO, the company should do an audit every year. Last one was 3 years ago, but I'm certain that someone wrote down every year that they did it.
  - EdwardKrayer 1y ago
    falsified paperwork is better than no paper trail in the event planes start falling out of the sky - spotting one moderate falsification could very well lead to further verification when it comes to investigations deemed important by the public.
    - M95D 1y ago
      Ah, yes, no paperwork, I completely forgot about that. It's even more common than fake doing stuff. Don't be so confident that falsification can be spotted. It usually can't. Or require very time-consuming cross-checks that I never saw happen in my entire 20y career, such as comparing the number times an internal control was run vs. the quantity of consumables used in the process that were bought. In case of Boeing, the other problem is... who's going to look before the plane crashes?
t_mann 1y ago
Do you know how it works in other places where planes get built, eg Europe, Brazil? The incumbents on both sides will always tell you that there's no other way things could be done. Looking at how they get done elsewhere seems like a good sanity check.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  They get done the same? Embraer works with lots of Americans.
KingOfCoders 1y ago
So Boeing can do something the US government can't do? I don't buy that argument.
tedggh 1y ago
The MCAS system is probably not the best example here because it doesn’t take expert knowledge on MCAS to catch lack of redundancy and poor documentation in the design of a system so critical. This one of the reasons patterns, processes and standards exist. I did this for a living and consulted for many companies in processes my team had no domain experience with, still we were able to catch process gaps. MCAS IMO was a flaw easy to flag for any competent auditor.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
kakacik 1y ago
That's trivial to solve and you are attacking the problem from wrong direction. Simple answer is: long term punishment for bad behavior. Company, executives, and indirectly but intensively shareholders. Make it an example, and make it fucking loud example for everybody. Anybody wanting a stable long term cash flows will align, and do their best to fix this. This is how banks were put in line after 2008, very effectively. No western bank knowingly circumvents new related regulations, punishments would be absolutely crushing and never worth the risk. Those people up there are not stupid, this is how calculus for criminals works.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
The problem that needs to be addressed is the proper expansion and funding of the FAA, not sacrificing safety for the expediency of corporate concerns. This is a solvable problem but instead regulatory capture actively thwarts it. The future will see more MCAS scenarios and more crashes because the process favors and shows deference to $$$ rather than to regulators.
chmod775 1y ago
The FAA has a budget of USD ~23,000m. Surely you can fit in some experts there. EASA fills a similar role on a budget a 100 times smaller (in USD it's ~300m), paying for ~800 personnel. The main difference is that EASA doesn't handle ATC, but it shows that the aspect of the FTC's duties we are talking about here really can't be that expensive. If you'd 10x the budget of the FAA, it would have the same budget as the entire EU or 4x Airbus/Boeing's revenue. That's ridiculous.
- lesuorac 1y ago
  > If you'd 10x the budget of the FAA, it would have the same budget as the entire EU or 4x Airbus/Boeing's revenue. That's ridiculous. 10x is a bit ridiculous but I'm not sure it's that ridiculous for the FAA to have more expenditures than Boeing. Sure, FAA (requested) budget is 22 Billion [1] while Boeing's revenue is 66 Billion [2]. However, United Airlines revenue is 57 Billion [3]. The FAA doesn't just manage Boeing so if we start adding up _every_ airline, airport, etc revenue I think that a budget of 66 Billion won't look as silly anymore. I mean they can't properly staff ATC currently so very trivially their current expenditures is too low. [1]: https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/FAA_FY_2026_Budget_Estimates_CJ.pdf https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/F... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines
  - chmod775 1y ago
    This thread was not discussing the FAA's ATC duties. I was trying to take the ATC component of the FAA out of the equation and illustrate why that is necessary. We should be looking specifically at the arm that certifies aircraft and try to figure out which order of magnitude we're dealing with. Luckily their European counterpart exists, which does not do ATC and thus allows us to get a better idea. In fact if you look at the FAA's budget request breakdown you can see that the requested budget for their entire AVS services arm is less than 2B[1] (still much more expensive than EASA, but not too terrible). While your comment is interesting, it's only tangential to what is being discussed. [1] https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/FAA_FY_2026_Budget_Estimates_CJ.pdf https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/F...
rkagerer 1y ago
After their abysmal track record, how about making Boeing pay for outside (unaffiliated) engineers to certify the safety? Like the engineering equivalent of an audit? I'm struggling to reconcile how you can give a company & self-certification system that failed so egregiously another chance.

NooneAtAll3 1y ago

how long ago did this self-certifying practice start? how much smaller was Boeing (and the whole aviation industry) back then?

hooskerdu 1y ago
Unit membership for manufacturing started with the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, but I’m not sure how involved or hands-off it was at the time.

dehrmann 1y ago

> This isn't unique to just aviation btw but most industries Most of us work in tech. Imagine an auditor coming in and trying to sort out if one of the most complex systems at your company is "safe." What's safe? Every previously known failure mode and every new one you're going to be blamed for when it happens.

xdfgh1112 1y ago
That's literally the security industry and third party security assessments are routine in tech.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  Having been in both in software/IT capacities, having done PCI certified software, medical device software (requiring FDA approval), no. Not even close. MAYBE, MAYBE the insurance company assessments/audits are kind of related to what you are talking about. But not really. But not the FAA ones. They are such a different beast with so much brain power involved along with people with a combined centuries of experience in this stuff, it's hard to explain without being around it.
- watwut 1y ago
  Yeah, but security industry is mostly a joke full of fraudsters. There are parts of it that work well, but most of it is theater and not that much competence. Which is fine for low states they deal with and not fine with planes.
hgomersall 1y ago
It's not about declaring things to be safe. It's about having documented and adhered to processes that show safety is taken seriously at every point in the design, manufacture and maintenance of safety critical systems.
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
I thought FDA regulated device software certification was hard, PCI certification just annoying. FAA certification is on another level from those. There's so many moving parts to aircraft certification honestly I was surprised when a new design would get type design certification. Which is why Boeing tries to do things like shoehorn in a new airplane under an older airplane type design (MAX) so they don't have to get a whole new type design approved.

jjav 1y ago

> If you're wondering - hey, that sounds terrible, why doesn't the FAA do anything about it? Answer, because it practically can't without maybe a 10x or more budget boost that's practically impossible. You're correct in that the FAA can't (or at least, it would be wildly impractical) have a staff of in-house experts that equal or exceed the experience of the manufacturer engineers on every possible topic. But, that's not necessary to enforce a process of quality. It can be done by enforcing that the company must establish and document the processes to ensure quality, including which experts need to sign off on what. Then the FAA needs to hold the engineers who sign off professionally responsible and their managment legally liable if any circumvention is discovered down the line.

M95D 1y ago
> It can be done by enforcing that the company must establish and document the processes to ensure quality You have no ideea. It's sooo extremely easy to fake everything! I'm working with ISO15189 right now. I could just fill paperwork saying I did things that I didn't really do. Nobody could tell the difference. Sometimes there's an audit. It's announced months in advance and they only just look at the paperwork. I'm the only one here that knows the analysers have trace logs and how do get/print them. Some of those logs are just CSV text files. I could fake those too. According to ISO, the company should do an audit every year. Last one was 3 years ago, but I'm certain that someone wrote down every year that they did it.
- EdwardKrayer 1y ago
  falsified paperwork is better than no paper trail in the event planes start falling out of the sky - spotting one moderate falsification could very well lead to further verification when it comes to investigations deemed important by the public.
  - M95D 1y ago
    Ah, yes, no paperwork, I completely forgot about that. It's even more common than fake doing stuff. Don't be so confident that falsification can be spotted. It usually can't. Or require very time-consuming cross-checks that I never saw happen in my entire 20y career, such as comparing the number times an internal control was run vs. the quantity of consumables used in the process that were bought. In case of Boeing, the other problem is... who's going to look before the plane crashes?

t_mann 1y ago

Do you know how it works in other places where planes get built, eg Europe, Brazil? The incumbents on both sides will always tell you that there's no other way things could be done. Looking at how they get done elsewhere seems like a good sanity check.

_DeadFred_ 1y ago
They get done the same? Embraer works with lots of Americans.

KingOfCoders 1y ago

So Boeing can do something the US government can't do? I don't buy that argument.

tedggh 1y ago

The MCAS system is probably not the best example here because it doesn’t take expert knowledge on MCAS to catch lack of redundancy and poor documentation in the design of a system so critical. This one of the reasons patterns, processes and standards exist. I did this for a living and consulted for many companies in processes my team had no domain experience with, still we were able to catch process gaps. MCAS IMO was a flaw easy to flag for any competent auditor.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

kakacik 1y ago

That's trivial to solve and you are attacking the problem from wrong direction. Simple answer is: long term punishment for bad behavior. Company, executives, and indirectly but intensively shareholders. Make it an example, and make it fucking loud example for everybody. Anybody wanting a stable long term cash flows will align, and do their best to fix this. This is how banks were put in line after 2008, very effectively. No western bank knowingly circumvents new related regulations, punishments would be absolutely crushing and never worth the risk. Those people up there are not stupid, this is how calculus for criminals works.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

The problem that needs to be addressed is the proper expansion and funding of the FAA, not sacrificing safety for the expediency of corporate concerns. This is a solvable problem but instead regulatory capture actively thwarts it. The future will see more MCAS scenarios and more crashes because the process favors and shows deference to $$$ rather than to regulators.

chmod775 1y ago

The FAA has a budget of USD ~23,000m. Surely you can fit in some experts there. EASA fills a similar role on a budget a 100 times smaller (in USD it's ~300m), paying for ~800 personnel. The main difference is that EASA doesn't handle ATC, but it shows that the aspect of the FTC's duties we are talking about here really can't be that expensive. If you'd 10x the budget of the FAA, it would have the same budget as the entire EU or 4x Airbus/Boeing's revenue. That's ridiculous.

lesuorac 1y ago
> If you'd 10x the budget of the FAA, it would have the same budget as the entire EU or 4x Airbus/Boeing's revenue. That's ridiculous. 10x is a bit ridiculous but I'm not sure it's that ridiculous for the FAA to have more expenditures than Boeing. Sure, FAA (requested) budget is 22 Billion [1] while Boeing's revenue is 66 Billion [2]. However, United Airlines revenue is 57 Billion [3]. The FAA doesn't just manage Boeing so if we start adding up _every_ airline, airport, etc revenue I think that a budget of 66 Billion won't look as silly anymore. I mean they can't properly staff ATC currently so very trivially their current expenditures is too low. [1]: https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/FAA_FY_2026_Budget_Estimates_CJ.pdf https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/F... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines
- chmod775 1y ago
  This thread was not discussing the FAA's ATC duties. I was trying to take the ATC component of the FAA out of the equation and illustrate why that is necessary. We should be looking specifically at the arm that certifies aircraft and try to figure out which order of magnitude we're dealing with. Luckily their European counterpart exists, which does not do ATC and thus allows us to get a better idea. In fact if you look at the FAA's budget request breakdown you can see that the requested budget for their entire AVS services arm is less than 2B[1] (still much more expensive than EASA, but not too terrible). While your comment is interesting, it's only tangential to what is being discussed. [1] https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/FAA_FY_2026_Budget_Estimates_CJ.pdf https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/F...

rkagerer 1y ago

After their abysmal track record, how about making Boeing pay for outside (unaffiliated) engineers to certify the safety? Like the engineering equivalent of an audit? I'm struggling to reconcile how you can give a company & self-certification system that failed so egregiously another chance.