Comment by sophrosyne42
3 months ago
Those decades were an era that followed massive airline deregulation. This is another case of the good regulation being less regulation.
3 months ago
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.”
This just isn't true even in the already regulated environment.
It is "irrational" for a "greedy" slaveowner to kill their slave, a significant monetary investment sometimes, and yet it happened all the time, because capital owners are not rational.
A significant fraction of aviation fatalities can be traced directly back to those "greedy capitalist villains" actually completely cutting corners to save a penny and losing million dollar aircraft.
Business owners are not rational actors, they are gamblers.
None of this is true. A company left to their own devices will optimize for maximum profit at the cost of literally everything else. Every cost of their business that's possible to externalize will be externalized. Every corner will be cut in the name of marginally better profits.
For example, you say lawsuits are costly. To a company, that's meaningless. The only question is, is the cost of a lawsuit greater than the money saved cutting corners? If not, it's better to kill people and deal with the lawsuits: [1].
Moreover, companies are still run by people, and people have biases. Most notable of which is the short-term thinking bias that results in companies irrationally optimizing for short-term gains, compromising long-term ones. And what fits perfectly into that trap? Yep, safety. Do you know how much money you could save by delaying maintenance? Lots, lots of money to be had right now vs a nebulous concept of potentially higher chance of an accident at some uncertain point in the future. The monkey with its primitive brain chooses the immediate reward every time.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE
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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.
I know where you are going with this. The FAA is indeed a burden when it comes to bringing new technology to market, including safety-critical technology. The cost of new tech and safety improvements would indeed go down without regulation, but on the balance, would all the other deep cost-cutting measures that airlines, manufacturers, airports, ATC would invoke actually result in increased safety overall? I'm not going to live 100 years so we'll never know, but I'm absolutely confident that it won't given how every other business in every other under-regulated industry sacrifices everything for the sake of profits.
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