How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
Also linked in this article is the original FAA table of differences between the Max and other 737 models. It makes no metion of MCAS.
I mean, yes, the trim system was being driven by input from a single nonredundant sensor, which is a violation of the kind of engineering for failure process that airliners should be designed in. But at the same time that trim system is, by design, not strong enough to overpower pilot input to the other control surfaces. I mean, it's supposed to have been possible for the pilot to just fly the aircraft to a landing in the face of outrageous trim problems.
But the actual pilots didn't, not because they weren't strong enough to push the yoke but because they simply didn't know what to do and didn't have the presence of mind to just yank hard on the controls. Somehow the culture of "just fly the ?!@#! plane" got lost in all those training iPads.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile... Quote:
The discrepancy over this number is magnified by another element in the System Safety Analysis: The limit of the system’s authority to move the tail applies each time MCAS is triggered. And it can be triggered multiple times, as it was on the Lion Air flight.
One current FAA safety engineer said that every time the pilots on the Lion Air flight reset the switches on their control columns to pull the nose back up, MCAS would have kicked in again and “allowed new increments of 2.5 degrees.”
“So once they pushed a couple of times, they were at full stop,” meaning at the full extent of the tail swivel, he said.
Peter Lemme, a former Boeing flight controls engineer who is now an avionics and satellite-communications consultant, said that because MCAS reset each time it was used, “it effectively has unlimited authority.”
You're misunderstanding that quote. It's talking about "authority" in the sense of software's authorization to move the trim tab, not the aerodynamic authority of the tailplane.
The 737 has a 60 year old, very conventional elevator with a trim tab. The tab changes the resting angle of the overall elevator, and thus the "center point" of tailplane force on the airframe. Being out of trim means that the aircraft might naturally want to pitch up or down, and forces the pilot to apply to force to the stick (which moves the elevator, not the trim tab!) to correct it.
This stick force can be significant and surprising, but it's designed to (and the certification surely requires it to) be achievable by a pilot under all conditions. That is: it's not supposed to be possible for any trim failure on a 737 to render an aircraft uncontrollable, and I don't see any assertion in the analysis of the MAX 8 that changes that.
At the end of the day, what happened here is that the aircraft had a runaway trim failure. That was a failure that was understood and forseen (albeit not under software control) in the aircraft's original design, and the redundancy to treat it was the pilot's physical ability to override the trim. This was supposed to have been a recoverable failure within the cockpit, and it wasn't.
[1] Style note: why do people do this on the internet? Ah hah! You fool! You are WRONG! Stuff is complicated folks, be nice, assume competence, assume lack of malice, try to teach and not argue.
If we cannot argue in a marketplace of ideas, we are prevented from having hard but necessary conversations. We need to adhere to parameters of civility of course, but to me, a necessary freedom is the freedom to disagree/dispute. Some ideas are truly wrong and they need to be put through the crucible.
That said, I've always been told to always "address the ideas, not the person" (never attack someone's character) and to adopt a pose of "curiosity".
> The 737 has a 60 year old, very conventional elevator with a trim tab. The tab changes the resting angle of the overall elevator, and thus the "center point" of tailplane force on the airframe. Being out of trim means that the aircraft might naturally want to pitch up or down, and forces the pilot to apply to force to the stick (which moves the elevator, not the trim tab!) to correct it.
I don't think so. The 737 has a trimmable horizontal stabilizer. Stab trim moves (and MCAS moves) the big and leading-edge airfoil and not a trailing-edge tab on a trailing-edge elevator control surface: https://my.mixtape.moe/tkyyzt.png
See https://www.satcom.guru/2018/11/stabilizer-trim.html (where i took this image from) for further details.
"Excessive air loads on the stabilizer may require effort by both pilots to correct mis-trim. In extreme cases it may be necessary to aerodynamically relieve the air loads to allow manual trimming. Accelerate or decelerate towards the in-trim speed while attempting to trim manually."
What you are saying is directly contradicted by the article unless you apply a very unconventional reading to the word "authority". What you're saying is also contradicted by just looking at an image of a 737's tail arrangement. Lastly, you're claiming that two pilots fell out of the sky to their deaths and it simply never occurred to them to try pulling back hard. I find that not just implausible, but bordering on poor taste.
That is incorrect for the 737 and many airliners. Elevator input is way less strong than trim. Trim moves the entire surface, not just the elevator control surface.
I had the same misconception, my brain was translating GA aircraft knowledge to airliners.
Some light GA aircraft have systems with jackscrews that deflect the horizontal stabilizer as in airliners. These systems are more efficient aerodynamically, but can overpower pilot input, at least in theory. The aero trim system (in prior paragraph) cannot.
No this is not true. In near stall situations for which the MCAS is designed, a full deflection of the elevators is not enough to counter the stabiliser effects. I'm not sure about the entire flight envelope, but I guarantee there are other situations where the elevator cannot counter the stabiliser.
The right way to "regain control" isn't to overpower the stabiliser by inputs to other flight control surfaces, but to disable automatic stabiliser trim and manually trim the aircraft.
27 - FLIGHT CONTROLS STABILIZER TRIM: Stab Trim cutout switches panel
I'm not a real-world airliner pilot (I just play with them in simulators), so I can't comment on whether it's reasonable to expect pilots to recognize the situation and react accordingly in this new failure mode. Without knowledge of the existence of the MCAS system and how it can fail, with uncommanded nose-down, it's unclear that pilots would think there were any factors they recognize that would cause a runaway trim situation and think, "oh, I need to run the runaway trim checklist." I think that's the crux of the argument "any 737 pilot should have been competent to save the plane because they should have recognized runaway stab trim" versus "the set of conditions that caused this problem involved systems that pilots weren't trained on, so it's not reasonable for them to recognize what was happening and realize they can fall back on different training that they did have."
Anyway... comment I was replying to seemed to imply the existence of the stab trim cutout switches implied that the MCAS system was made known to pilots, which is why I pointed out those switches had been there forever.
[1]: https://www.ethiopianairlines.com/EAA
[2]: https://www.cae.com/news-events/press-releases/caes-boeing-7...
There's a lot of damning information, not only for Boeing, but also a lot of negligence at the FAA for pushing engineers to 'delegate' reviews of certain components back to Boeing themselves.
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...
An audit usually goes like: "I see that you mentioned a change in document X, show me the corresponding test report", "who is responsible for that part?", "does document Y match document X, as required by norm Z?".
They will never check that you actually did the tests, or that the analysis is correct. Only that the paperwork is done correctly and that the person responsible is identified. Their field of expertise is in the process, not software or mechanical engineering.
But now that they have a list of names, and if one of them rubberstamped something that wasn't actually done, things won't go well for him. It can get really serious, possibly resulting in prison time, so managers usually don't that this duty lightly.
I don't think this is accurate whatsoever. USDA has inspections all the time, they don't just check a report you file with them and go "Oh yeah, they know what they're doing over there." Similar with other industries.
If a regulatory body doesn't validate the tests of a manufacturer, what good is that body?
> I don't think this is accurate whatsoever.
Which part, that the FAA encourages delegation to Boeing? This is established, AFAIK.
What they do is ask the manufacturer to lay out how they run the trial before they start.
If you bring data back to the FDA that doesn’t match up (fewer patients, different measurements) you can expect a rejection.
As a software person, this led to some results that seemed rather counterintuitive.
Then again, this level of detachment seems necessary for complex systems. The chef at your favorite restaurant doesn't personally test all raw ingredients to ensure they're safe. They get them from a reputable source, and make sure they're stored and prepared properly when under the restaurant's care.
I suspect that this concept is foreign to much of the software world (and hopefully only temporarily) because our raw ingredients are so low quality, and there's no regulation or certification. Half the libraries I'm using (even first-party ones) have significant bugs that I have to work around. If instead of workarounds I just said "That bug you found is actually a bug in <library X>", my app would be completely unusable, and there's be no upstream pressure for these libraries to ever get fixed.
Right. The more paper you have the cleaner your bottom will be.
The 737 horizontal tail externally looks like 3 moving parts:front-to-back (and large to small) is: Stabilizer : Elevator : Balance Tab.
see here: http://www.b737.org.uk/flightcontrols.htm#Pitch
Stabilizer moves in response to trim - this is what we are mostly looking at.
Elevator moves in response to the control column.
Balance tab has several modes depending on flaps and hydraulic system health - but it mostly serves to offset aerodynamic force on the elevator in case the hydraulics fail and the elevator has to be controlled manually.
(there is one other pitch control, I learned - the spoilers on the wing can give some help in landing in case the elevator controls fail.)
There are many modes of operation and simple generalizations will not help.
How are those type certifications determined? It seems to me that there should be an instance checking if the type certifications make sense.
Or perhaps they did, and they just really look like similar planes. In which case I wonder if the threshold for 'versioning' should be changed.
(I know nothing of how this actually works, it just baffles me that seemingly different planes get the same certificate)
EDIT: I read the FAA does check this, but I wonder on what _grounds_ it makes the decisions.
I don't know how they measure such differences, but you'd think that different engines, different aerodynamics, and a new control system to compensate for those differences, are enough to warrant a new type certification.
It sounds really cumbersome to have it either-or way, making it difficult to develop planes too much incrementally and keeping it very costly to start from scratch with a completely new design.
The system, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, was incorporated because the plane has larger engines placed further forward on the craft, and so has a chance of facing a stall at lower speeds than earlier 737 variations.
Would require more training than a few hours.
I think you may have misread something. Normally stalling at a lower speed is a good thing.
No, that's not the issue. The issue is that, because of the pitch up moment created by the engines, at higher angles of attack the force required to move the yoke decreases instead of increasing. That's (a) a highly undesirable characteristic since the changing feedback confuses pilots and makes it hard for them to know when a stall is imminent, and (b) a violation of FAA certification requirements. MCAS was added to compensate for the pitch up moment from the engines by adding nose down trim, so the yoke force would be similar to that of previous 737 models.
The media has done a poor job of communicating exactly what MCAS does and why it was developed. With today's media motivated by virality, ad clicks and eyeballs, most seem more interested in reporting this as dramatically as possible.
In 2019, we need to wise up to these shenanigans. Fear isn't the only mindkiller. It turns out that Outrage Virality is very synergistic with fear. Our society needs to become very skeptical and notice when something is evoking that particular emotion. We need to view people hawking outrage like we now view medicine shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
EDIT: If someone has gotten one to really hate a person, really want to harm them, and wonder if they're really sentient, or wonder if they're looking at the same reality, or wonder if they're really human -- this is a big red flag. This is precisely the state of having those in-group/out-group instincts tweaked. Word to the wise! Expert tip: It even counts when one is shocked at someone else's groupthink! Perhaps especially so.
Agreed. But "more prone to stall" in this sense ("easier for the pilot to accidentally pitch into a stall") is not the same as "stalls at lower speeds", which is what the post I responded to was claiming.
This is not just splitting hairs. These distinctions matter.
They simply assert to the FAA that the aircraft meets the type requirements.
Boeing showed the FAA their test results, said that with MCAS the aircraft meets requirements, doesn't require extra training, and the FAA took their word for it. Authorities in most other countries trust the FAA, so they took their word for it too.
That's an oversimplification, but more or less what happened.
As to whether Boeing was deliberately deceptive, we'll probably find out in due time as investigations have begun and subpoenas issued.
They simply assert to the FAA that the aircraft meets the type requirements.
To assert this, but also change such a critical emergency procedure, which is made more critical by a decision motivated primarily by economics -- this just sounds bad.
Basically, we've set up a situation where short term thinking is eventually, over many thousands of iterations of such decisions which go into producing such a complex product, going to override long term safety thinking.
Unfortunately, substituting regulations for good thinking has the potential to nonsensically stymie progress if done incorrectly.
Help me understand this statement. Are you suggesting that regulation in this instance would not help with safety?
Not at all. Often regulations help with safety in the short and medium term. The problem is that they aren't written by oracles, so they can become outdated and fail to account for changes in technology. (How does "stymie progress" translate to not helping with safety?)
Model doesn't matter. It's possible to have two different models with the same type rating (Airbus A320 vs A340), and it's just as possible to have a derivative that requires a different type rating.
It would have been better for whom to treat the MAX as something different, requiring its own type rating? It's pretty clear it was overwhelmingly the airlines who wanted a new 737 in the existing 737 type rating.
Having said all that, I’m open to hearing how you think regulation was the real culprit here.
I wonder i that remains the case.
Up to now the FAA's certification was the gold standard upon which every other certification agent use to ruberstamp their own certifications.
I wonder what happens after this overly cozy relationship came to light.
(Presentation preparation is like this. My last presentation failed because by self-training wasn't designed with this in mind.)
Rehearse. Repetition strengthens associations and so increases the chance that you will fall into the same behavior.
Or anything for that matter?
Masaad Ayoob revolutionized police gunfighting techniques by simplifying movements and changing techniques to more closely resemble the natural stance people take when in the "Fight or Flight" mode.
When an airplane is diving into the ground, the natural inclination for pilots is to pull back on the stick. Making the override resemble this would be a way of following this design principle. I think the situation which caused the accident is a bit more complicated and nuanced than just that idea, however.
Even with pilots aware of the MCAS system, I don't see how anything short of simulator time can really make these planes safe.
"The safety analysis... assessed a failure of the system as one level below “catastrophic.” But even that “hazardous” danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor — and yet that’s how it was designed."
Neither Boeing nor the FAA should have given this a pass.
737 MAX 8 Cockpit - https://i2.wp.com/thepointsguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/0...
737 800 Cockpit - https://i.imgur.com/eRULoST.jpg
I don't really know my way around an airliner but the key displays seem to be quite different and there's a lot fewer knobs on the MAX 8.
Here you have another max 8 with a completely different layout on those screens: http://www.driven-technologies.com/images/bt_portfolio/52/or...
But the key controls in these accidents are identical. Namely the electronic trim on the yoke, the trim wheels in the middle and the cut-off switches to the right and below the throttles.
==================================================
The discrepancy over this number is magnified by another element in the System Safety Analysis: The limit of the system’s authority to move the tail applies each time MCAS is triggered. And it can be triggered multiple times, as it was on the Lion Air flight.
One current FAA safety engineer said that every time the pilots on the Lion Air flight reset the switches on their control columns to pull the nose back up, MCAS would have kicked in again and “allowed new increments of 2.5 degrees.”
“So once they pushed a couple of times, they were at full stop,” meaning at the full extent of the tail swivel, he said.
Peter Lemme, a former Boeing flight controls engineer who is now an avionics and satellite-communications consultant, said that because MCAS reset each time it was used, “it effectively has unlimited authority.”
...
Boeing insists that the pilots on the Lion Air flight should have recognized that the horizontal stabilizer was moving uncommanded, and should have responded with a standard pilot checklist procedure to handle what’s called “stabilizer runaway.”
If they’d done so, the pilots would have hit cutoff switches and deactivated the automatic stabilizer movement.
Boeing has pointed out that the pilots flying the same plane on the day before the crash experienced similar behavior to Flight 610 and did exactly that: They threw the stabilizer cutoff switches, regained control and continued with the rest of the flight.
However, pilots and aviation experts say that what happened on the Lion Air flight doesn’t look like a standard stabilizer runaway, because that is defined as continuous uncommanded movement of the tail.
On the accident flight, the tail movement wasn’t continuous; the pilots were able to counter the nose-down movement multiple times.
In addition, the MCAS altered the control column response to the stabilizer movement. Pulling back on the column normally interrupts any stabilizer nose-down movement, but with MCAS operating that control column function was disabled.
These differences certainly could have confused the Lion Air pilots as to what was going on.
MCAS only works when autopilot is OFF (and flaps retracted).
And airplanes, particularly modern jets, are fascinating no matter what they're doing. I remember twenty, thirty years ago looking out the towering floor-to-ceiling windows at the airport, marveling at how many different technological fields had to come together to make air travel possible: materials, energy, engineering, radio, logistics, physics, process control, weather prediction, mapping, software development—nowadays even spaceflight and the freakin' theory of relativity come into play where GPS is in use. As a budding geek it was (and still is) catnip.
And then these two MAX jets go down within months of each other. Three hundred and forty six people killed. Three hundred and forty six families shattered, forever. When I think about them, I'm reminded that these weren't just malfunctions to be debugged in my terminal, these were three hundred and forty six tragedies that will ripple out to their friends, families, coworkers, and beyond, for decades to come.
I wonder if we are being hasty in our speculation about the causes. I know we are all intensely curious—that intense curiosity is, I think, a defining feature of the community that frequents this site, and something a lot of us owe our successes to. I notice though a tendency for speculation to evolve into factual claims through repetition, and I wonder if we should be more careful not to allow repetition to take the place of evidence.
Accident investigation is a slow process, and slow processes are frustrating. Information comes in a trickle. It's natural to want to piece together whatever details we have, wherever we can find them. In our hunger to find out what happened, how these 346 people lost their lives, let's not lose sight of the fact that the information we have right now is incomplete.
Let's also not lose sight of the fact that we are talking about people. For the loved ones, this isn't an interesting puzzle; this is a gut-wrenching sorrow. I try to keep that at the center whenever someone asks me what I think about these crashes.
I'm glad the MAX is grounded. And I'm intensely curious about what happened. I try to temper my thoughts on the matter according to the amount and quality of information I have, and the degree of knowledge and experience I've acquired. I don't always succeed. But I can at least rest easy knowing that the investigative team has access to a wealth of information and experience, and that they will make their data and findings public when their work is complete.
Slow, and possibly corrupted process. If we believe the FAA has been captured by industry, do we trust the outcome of their investigation to be impartial? Do we trust their investigation to be at all competent?
I think it's incredibly important we all remain skeptical of the FAA and Boeing in this; the FAA's reluctance to ground the MAX 8 until it was ordered by the president shows their bias. Any sensible human with a safety-first mindset would have immediately grounded the aircraft after the second crash until a complete investigation was done.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/why-france-is-analyzin...
Correction: US accident investigations are conducted by the NTSB, not the FAA. By design, it's not even part of the DOT, the parent org of the FAA.
From their Wikipedia entry—
"From 1967 to 1975, the NTSB reported to the DOT for administrative purposes, while conducting investigations into the Federal Aviation Administration, also a DOT agency.
To avoid any conflict, Congress passed the Independent Safety Board Act, and on April 1, 1975, the NTSB became a fully independent agency."
I'd be more concerned by the regulatory capture that permitted this to happen than the specific model of aircraft.
My uninformed assumption is that once a suitable issue is isolated some sort of remediation (training/software/airframe/cockpit) all under the onset of various international gov bodies. No idea if the is a 1 year or 5 year process.
There are big PR risks in that approach, though.
> According to a detailed FAA briefing to legislators, Boeing will change the MCAS software to give the system input from both angle-of-attack sensors.
> It will also limit how much MCAS can move the horizontal tail in response to an erroneous signal. And when activated, the system will kick in only for one cycle, rather than multiple times.
> Boeing also plans to update pilot training requirements and flight crew manuals to include MCAS.
> These proposed changes mirror the critique made by the safety engineers in this story. They had spoken to The Seattle Times before the Ethiopian crash.
> The FAA said it will mandate Boeing’s software fix in an airworthiness directive no later than April.
After the fixes are implemented I wouldn't worry too much about it. Lots of planes have had terrible design flaws that were fixed. The pre-MAX 737 included.
Sure, but none of those planes (in the last 30 years or so) had two full hull losses within month of each other with brand new planes.
Ignoring all other issues pointed out in TFA, two really stand out: The use of a single AoA sensor for a "Hazardous" component seems flat out wrong to me. The ability of MCAS to cause maximum deflection of the trim, rather than some limit (2.5 vs 0.6 is a quibble compared to 2.5 vs unlimited) also seems bad.
i.e. people were following up on this before the public outcry started.
How does it work in other countries?
Instead of applying pressure on the FAA to cut corners, Boeing and Airbus should lobby Congress to increase FAA funding.
Firstly, I think the whole issue is not going away any time soon which is bad enough.
But what looks worse is the article points to high levels of incompetence, if not gross negligence in the design and testing of the MCAS.
Like all 737s, the MAX actually has two of the sensors, one on each side of the fuselage near the cockpit. But the MCAS was designed to take a reading from only one of them.
Lemme said Boeing could have designed the system to compare the readings from the two vanes, which would have indicated if one of them was way off.
Alternatively, the system could have been designed to check that the angle-of-attack reading was accurate while the plane was taxiing on the ground before takeoff, when the angle of attack should read zero.
I can see this headed to the courts and if the details in the article are found to be correct, there's a good chance Boeing would be up for a rather big settlement, not to mention a massive dent to their reputation
Then...it turned out that when this control system malfunctions (which is can, quite often, due to aforementioned low reliability requirements), it will actually crash the plane.
The lesson is probably: make sure that some system you're designing with low reliability characteristics (only uses one sensor, doesn't have redundant power supplies...) will fail with safe or benign outcomes.
The Cormac C919 just got a big boost.
I would bet good money that there is a wonderful book to be written about competing design teams, rival marketing plans, and mahogany row politics at Boeing about events resulting in the MAX kludge.
Also: "An airline pilot reveals why a plane Boeing discarded 12 years ago is the one they desperately need"
https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-757-pilot-reveals-737...
> Southwest Airlines has only operated Boeing 737 jetliner models, except for a period from 1979 to 1987
I expect that sort of things was part of the decision. Even more so as Boeing never really try to unify their offering and provide airbus-style CCQ[0][1] so there is a very strong incentive & pressure to update frames and keep them in the same rating to avoid crew retraining costs.
[0] moving from an A320 to an A380 can take as little as 15 days, other moves are much shorter (down to 2 days CCQ for — I believe — moving between the A330 and the A340)
[1] boeing does have some common type rating courses but only between a few pairs e.g. between the 757 and 767, or from the 777 to the 787
Norwegian suspended its use of the 737 Max8 for their main airline, but I haven’t seen anything about their use on their subsidiary airlines.
In the age where "engineers": (1) can automatically land a "VW bug sized" rover on Mars (2) can land booster rockets practically from orbit (3) can make an adaptive flight control system that can fly a drone even when half a wing is blown clean off mid-flight (on purpose). https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=JyyN-qWWNfQ
How does this MCAS system, as part of a larger flight dynamics system, have so little understanding of what the hell it is doing to the flight dynamics?
I am beyond confused...
It might fall on the airlines, especially Southwest which refuses to fly anything but 737 and thus keeps demanding new ever more altered revisions of the same original frame without type change.
But even then at the end of the day if Boeing can't fulfil those demands properly and ethically they are the ones to blame.
In the aggregate, consumers will likely flock to the cheaper version of commodities, that doesn't mean it's legal let alone ethical to e.g. sell talc full of asbestos because that's cheaper than selling asbestos-free talc.
My attempt at a succinct answer is that carbon should be more expensive, and that Boeing very likely moved too aggressively to meet the market with a more fuel efficient plane.
In some ways – based on my probably naive understanding – consumer desire for a cheaper flight results in increased fuel efficiency, since the cost of flying is heavily dependent on the cost of fuel. Environmentally speaking, that's good. However, better fuel efficiency resulting in cheaper flights leads to people flying more. That's bad.
Pricing carbon to reflect its true environmental cost could fix that issue, by raising the price floor. Consumer choice would still drive higher efficiency, but ideally the overall higher cost of carbon would keep flying to a 'sustainable' rate. (Whatever that turns out to be.)
What I don't have a clear sense of is whether point-to-point travel with planes like the Max are better for the environment. Theoretically, hub-and-spoke travel is more fuel efficient. The reality ends up being more complicated, with airlines flying half-empty 747s. From what I understand, that makes airlines like Southwest (which operates point-to-point) more fuel efficient.
But I'd love to hear a more clear explanation from someone who better understands the subject.
This part sounds complicated. It might be good for the people but bad for the environment. On the other hand, it probably also displaces some long-distance driving, and we have to estimate how much that is. Even if the environmental impact of reduced driving doesn't cancel out the cost of added flights, it's probably worth putting a value on the safety benefit. (Even though the current thread is about plane crashes, flying is overall much safer than driving, and reducing driving by even a little saves lives.)
It's also extremely well known especially in environmental economics, if not well understood / solved: it's Jevon's Paradox (more efficient use of a resource can lead to an increase in demand which causes an increase in total resource consumption).
But in the past there have been worse incidents and Boeing lied and cheated their way out of them without seeing any large penalties: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19389983
How much more proof do we need as a society that self regulation is a fool's errand?
Instead the narrative is about big, bloated bureaucracies, ignoring the fact that they got so big by having to respond and add additional layers every time someone figured out a new way to screw things up, as with Boeing.
On the other hand I've seen many people complain about "regulatory capture" between FAA + Boeing repeatedly. That's even on the Wikipedia for FAA.
> The FAA has been cited as an example of regulatory capture, "in which the airline industry openly dictates to its regulators its governing rules, arranging for not only beneficial regulation, but placing key people to head these regulators."
Which is an entirely different problem than a culture of "pulling up your bootstraps".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Administratio...
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/perspective-on-airline-sa...
By any measure, the FAA and industry have done an exceptional job of keeping the American flying public safe.
And simply saying the Brooking's opinion isn't relevant isn't actually a supporting argument. Neither is stating that trains have more deaths: so do cars, but neither point is relevant to whether or not airplane safety was damaged by deregulation. Besides which, I think your estimate misses the much higher casualty rates among private aircraft, which do in fact rival cars [0]
The question has little to do with whether the FAA has done a good job, it's about what happened after the deregulation, and whether it would be even better without it.
[0] https://www.livescience.com/49701-private-planes-safety.html
Numerous aspects of the FAA have been politicized for decades (going back to at least the ATC strike under Reagan). The FAA also has a number of complex and lengthy programs (https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/ etc) that are have drawn extensive criticism from Congress, industry, and airport operators due to the cost, delays, and scope of proposed regulation etc. Even FAA reauthorization is a politically contentious issue.
Regulation for regulations sake (as in telling the public it's "regulated" by pointing to current scale and existing policymaking, while in reality it is not having the intended effect) is even worse than having no regulation at all.
The current congressional majority is hardly composed on the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" types being blamed by the GP. At least in terms of rhetoric and campaign platitudes they are known. Even among a significant percentage of the republicans camp is far from fitting into the anti-government oversight camp.
The article mentions of a lack of "funding" but I haven't been able to find any evidence where funding for aircraft safety has been reduced in the last few decades. If there was a crisis of funding, where new planes aren't getting sufficient oversight or controls, then this regulatory body have either failed to make it a public issue, shutdown whistleblowers, or (more likely) it's a failure of regulatory capture and/or the monopoly-esque companies have learned how to navigate the political system (checking the right checkboxes) without any disincentives for doing so.
As an individual, you probably want some kind of life insurance in the event of catastrophe. Your insurance carrier may require you only ride in such and such certified aircraft (eg, an aircraft that is insured against loss of life). An aircraft may only obtain insurance if it meets certain requirements, etc.
Unfortunately, we've got a regulatory body asleep at the wheel, telling people things are safe when they're not. This is distorting the insurance marketplace.
In a system with regulations, there has to be some meaningful method of enforcing penalties, and IMO this is particularly needed in the are of liability.
It shouldn't matter if Boeing got a defective part from a manufacturer, or bad software, or what have you from a 3rd party. It's still their primary responsibility to ensure safe travels. If that means certifying each and every nut and bolt that comes into their supply chain, then so be it.
$50m per dead passenger should be a suitable amount. We'll see just how confident they are in this MCAS and all this automation nonsense then.
The free market is not a panacea that solves every problem. It does solve some problems. Arguably for a very long time some degree of freedom has been better than the alternative of centrally controlled economies, but that doesn't mean that no better alternative or balance of the forces exists.
Probably because the culture of the time was that everyone knew horses were dangerous and if you borrowed a horse and it threw you, it was your fault, not the lender's.
There, the free market did provide a solution, but not for my original example. Because a free market does not solve all problems, even those that might theoretically be solved by a free market.
As for the free market resulting in utopia, that's an impossible standard. What the free market does do, however, is solve problems in an efficient way thereby bringing prosperity to every country that tries it.
> Because a free market does not solve all problems, even those that might theoretically be solved by a free market.
If it's a solvable problem, it can be solved with the free market. If a solution is possible that is merely not implemented, that means the market decided it wasn't of sufficient utility.
My argument doesn't say the free market can't solve problems. It's not terribly difficult to think of theoretical free-market solutions to many problems. My argument is that the free market doesn't solve all problems. Or if I grant your reasoning on the horse problem, they don't appear anything like as quickly as we'd want.
For example, it wasn't that long ago that heresy would get you burned at the stake, but a sexist/racist joke didn't even merit comment.
Today, it's the reverse.
> There were no insurance markets for potential injury due to riding a horse, no private certification of stables that lent horses to ensure animals were fit and free of issues of temperament that might cause them to throw a rider.
Insurance markets have appeared for all manner of things now. This argument doesn't really make any sense.
> The free market is not a panacea that solves every problem. It does solve some problems.
I haven't heard of a problem it doesn't solve yet. How much safety regulation (via insurance) would an airline industry need? I don't know, but the market would surely tell us. It may decide that more or less safety is optimal, based on market inputs. Surely there are proponents of more regulation and surely there are proponents of less regulation, how do we decide who's right?
Your argument amounts to an article of faith. "The free market solves all problems, because if we let it, it would find a way." The crux of your comment when given an example where there was no such solution was to repeat your article of faith.
If centuries is an acceptable time scale for obtaining a solution, then we're not really arguing about the same thing at all. I'm sure we could both come up with theoretical free market solutions to just about any issue. The problem is they don't always materialize, and it's not terribly difficult to see any number of issues in history that existed before widespread regulation that were not solved by the free market.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2019/03/18/did-tru...
>Still, the US DOT mandated that the FAA begin the process of review to reduce regulations. The FAA assigned this task to ARAC, effectively putting the question of what rules to cut and which to eliminate before creating new ones in the hands of a body that includes representatives from manufacturers and airlines.
If a suspect nicely asks a police officer not to arrest them, and the officer complies, that's a failure of policing.
The only difference here is that the vulnerability of regulatory bodies to asking nicely is so well-recognized that it has a fancy name ("Regulatory Capture"), and is backed by loads of published research, and quite frankly is probably the reason that the business class even submits to this sort of regulation at all.
A more accurate analogy would be the police chief ordering the officer not to arrest the judge's son for drunk driving.
If the police chief was asked on a golf course not to arrest someone, but instead do "self policing", and he complied, it's still a failure in policing, and not any failure of whatever "self policing" is supposed to be.
Maybe we need a regulation solution that doesn't involve handing over ultimate authority half the time to a party that is consistently on record as opposing regulation?
> But an inherent bug of government regulation is that it's always vulnerable to lobbying like you cited. So it's still a failure of regulation, except one that is permanent and unsurprising.
It's a failure of regulation that the regulated would lobby to weaken regulation?
I think these positions are essentially the same, at least in the case of most consumer-facing regulation. The latter would cause a myriad of captive "independent regulatory" bodies to emerge to confuse consumers, complete with slick websites and easy to confuse names and logos (or outright fraudulent ones). It would be hard to sort through them, and no one will have the time to do it.
Meanwhile, evidently "nobody has the time" for knocking on enough congressmen's doors to override Big Business' billion-dollar lobbying efforts, and so here we are watching planes fall from the sky.
Mainly because it relies on government regulation to function, namely trademark law. It's also probably a fairly unique case, since I doubt there's a ton of money in kosher food production (meaning the payoff for abusing the system is low), and the people who care about keeping kosher care about it a lot and can focus on it due to the presence of other regulation.
Smaller nations follow FAA or EASA. Russia and China have their own certification systems but defer largely to the Big Two for imports. However it is notable that the Chinese regulator took a long time and much persuading before they accepted the Max.
Why it isn't done at an international level I don't know. Small aircraft could still be certificated nationally if they're not intended for export.
Self-regulation as a consequence of the FAA getting insufficient funding is distinctly on-topic.