Comment by prophesi
3 months ago
Good regulation is how air travel became the safest method of travel in the past few decades without impeding on innovation or affordability. Bad regulation is when that same regulatory body, the FAA, delegates most of the oversight to the very same companies they should be overseeing.
IMO, we're in an age where regulation is the only tool left for a civilized society to leash their multi-billion corporations to actually help benefit society and not only their shareholders. I've been beating around the bush, but Boeing has already rebounded (tremendously) after the tragic incidents in the past few years.
Those decades were an era that followed massive airline deregulation. This is another case of the good regulation being less regulation.
Aviation is still one of the most heavily regulated areas in the country, though, and its excellent safety record is due to the practices adopted within that regulatory environment.
If the FAA were to disappear tomorrow, I guarantee with absolute, utter certainty, that aviation's safety performance would drop--in some cases over time, in some cases, overnight. I would bet any amount of money on that.
That is not obvious, and evidence in the airline industry shows that deregulation did not lead to the catastrophe you claim it will, but will make things better.
Regional and commercial jets cost tens and hundreds of millions of USD. The greediest caricature capitalist will want to protect this investment. Their insurers will demand certain terms to accept the risk of having to replace such a costly asset. Our greedy capitalist villain wants repeat business. Dead customers don’t pay again. Lawsuits are costly. Their friends and family will be reluctant to book fares with airlines they perceive as being unsafe. “Qantas never crashed.”
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I will take the other side of the bet. I offer you 1 to 10000 odds that, if the FAA disappears or otherwise becomes defunct, that the airline safer would be broadly agreed to be marginally safer 100 years afterwards.
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> Bad regulation is when that same regulatory body, the FAA, delegates most of the oversight to the very same companies they should be overseeing.
I wrote about this in the past, but the TLDR is that it’s anywhere between extremely tough to impossible to do it. The TLDR is that modern tech systems are so many and so advanced that only engineers of the company can truly understand it.
Ah yes, the best thing for society is surely to take the power from private people and businesses and to centralize it in government bureaucracy. Then only a small handful of people get to decide how we live! Along with the threat of imprisonment or violence if we don’t comply! Such a great idea.