Comment by delusional
10 hours ago
Separating "regulators" and "manufacturers" in such distinct categories is overly simplistic, I'm afraid. As we saw with the whole Boeing debacle, the manufacturers are the experts on what they build, and we expect them to give clear, levelheaded, and honest guidance to operators and regulators. That also means they must have some responsibility for the outcomes of that guidance.
Having a separate regulator, which does no building themselves, somehow maintain a separate team of independent experts is a fools errand. We should of course have independent evaluators, but the people building the thing are the experts on the thing.
It's a challenging problem. Going back to when I was in aerospace even just with the FAA we had FAA west and FAA east, and they were treated as different entities within our company because they had such different approaches/understanding and then the EASA which was from our experience a protectionist entity that would look for gotchas on American competitors and not a neutral safety focused party and refused to recognized treaty obligated acceptance of FAA certification (and it was a big issue that the US refused to step in on our behalf and require the treaty be followed because the US authorities put safety first even though the US had agreed we were safe and had demonstrated it).