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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

Not likely to happen. It is a very expensive and difficult process to get a new airframe FAA certified to carry commercial passengers, which is part of why the Dreamliner took so long to be delivered. Couple that with basically zero margin for airlines and you have a perfect storm of "it's really expensive to make a new plane and no one will pay for it if you do".

There's a reason you see so many 20+ year old CRJ-900s and MD-80/90s at the airport. Airlines literally cannot afford new planes, and aircraft makers can't get new airframes through the regulator process easily enough. Boeing struggled to get fly-by-wire to pass FAA regulations, how do you think they'd fare trying to replace aluminum with 3D printed plastic?

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The GA industry is running up against the same problems. Go to your local flight school and 99% of the time you'll just see a row of 1970s Cessnas/Pipers. Recently there has been some push back against the FAA's certification programs due to the fact that MEMS systems are inherently more reliable instruments than gyroscopes powered by engine driven vacuum pumps. This resulted in some legislative changes and now you can (IIRC) replace many gages in old aircraft with newer electronic variants and not need a Supplementary Type Certificate (basically like getting your car re-titled to replace the tape deck with a CD player).

tl;dr: It's basically become apparent that too much safety is killing people.

> Go to your local flight school and 99% of the time you'll just see a row of 1970s Cessnas/Pipers.

This neatly illustrates why: http://i.imgur.com/Un22IYK.png

It's not just certification, either. Product liability accounts for a large part of this increase: "Average cost of manufacturer's liability insurance for each airplane manufactured in the U.S. had risen from approximately $50 per plane in 1962 to $100,000 per plane in 1988." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalizatio...)

Yea, I'm really comparing two disparate issues here. The aircraft cost, for previously certified airframes, ie. the C172SP, as opposed to an SR22 or something, is almost entirely liability liability inflated while avionics are more heavily driven by certification.

This is why the experimental market is doing so well right now. No need to pay for either :P

Agree. Govt regulations can become a a major road block. As much good these regulations provide for the safety of consumers, they sure can prove out to be a hurdle for innovation when ill enforced. For example, I have heard from friends doing compliance testing with FTC for new hardware and how govt appointed contractors or their own employees literally go through thick books to make sure EVERYTHING checks out. Rules and regulations are good. But they can also be implemented smartly. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to work with FAA. For example, having a person on the floor doing manual stress testing on the airframe can be cumbersome and time consuming. Maybe some sort of automated solution involving a robot can expedite things, at least for the comprehensive initial check. Then bring in a manual person to do sanity check.

The history of accidents from well intended people doing the wrong things even when it cost them their lives creates a very different culture. It may seem wasteful, but that mostly the mismatch between doing something correctly thousands of times and doing it correctly millions of times. You can pay attention and do a complex things correctly thousands of times, but for millions that simply does not work.

If the medical industry worked like the FAA the jobs would be boring, and ~30,000+ fewer people would die a year.

Plenty of large successful businesses run on razor thin margins, however the airline industry is not lean. The internal waste is immense.

Source: Had an airline for a client, saw how sausage gets made

Same in healthcare. I work in one of the EMR companies, usually onsite at clients, and the whole operation is appalling in wasted human time and just cash wasted on stupid things.

Do tell!

I have one for our EMR: You can easily configure checkboxes, but not radio buttons, on an order form. Argh.

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