Comment by hiAndrewQuinn
3 months ago
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.
I'm actually just taking the very outside view on this. I cannot think of any industry which has both existed for 100 years and would not be called safer today than it was 100 years ago. The closest I get are industries which stopped existing entirely because new industries supplanted them, but even there the argument is suspect. This seems to be a general trend regardless of the amount of regulation applied to the industry.
I think you might be unaware of the various regulations that are driving all of these other non-aviation industries towards better safety. Not only that, but liability and insurance claims also drive safety measures, which are also enabled by workman's comp and other regulations). I'm having trouble imagining a single company policy around safety (either for workers or customers) that is not ultimately driven by government involvement or the legal system.
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