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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

This is an excellent example of how regulation should work as opposed to how it works in regulatory capture situations.

In a prisoners dilemma like set up, if any airline unilaterally changed their rules for pilots and crews, they would "lose out" when they didn't have crews to fly, while other airlines would "win more" by overworking their flight crews. The only "win" was for all airlines to not implement these changes.

But when the changes were forced on everyone, it removed the advantage of not following the guidelines (well it added a criminal or civil prosecution risk) and so all airlines have at least minimally rested crews.

That message seems to get lost sometimes.

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I would say this is an excellent example of how regulation shouldn't work.

Even before the Colgan Air crash, it was widely understood that regional airlines' overworking and undertraining of their pilots was risky. But the regulators either weren't able to do anything about it in the face of industry opposition, or didn't care enough to do so. It took a plane actually crashing, 50 people dying and Congress, which was lobbied hard by the families of the victims, passing new legislation ordering them to do something about the problem to get them to take action.

It's great that we have regulations protecting passengers from these problems now. But it would have been much better if it hadn't taken the deaths of those 50 people to create an environment where it was possible for such regulations to be enacted. Good regulators protect people before there's blood on the floor, not after.

Though I do agree with the a lot of what you're saying it does seems like what you are suggesting is that had the regulations worked "as they should" then we could have always prevented accidents like this. I'm not sure that's realistic.

> Good regulators protect people before there's blood on the floor, not after.

So to be good regulators, they have to be essentially omniscient?

No. Post-mortems of these types of disasters usually reveal that warning signs were visible if anyone cared to look or act.

One example happening now: extreme, pervasive sleep deprivation in the US Navy. We've already had disasters that could've been prevented if someone talked to even a single sailor and realized how dangerous that is.

Another example is self-driving cars. We just had a Tesla crash, and yet Tesla will not be regulated properly and will likely kill someone soon. Arguably, they already have.

If the regulations had been enacted before the incident, how would anyone know whether or not they even worked?

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