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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

At best, stricter regulations may have resulted in a different design to comply with US regulations. The FAA is not a global organization, they don’t have oversight over any of the crashed aircraft. So, it’s tricky to place blame on US regulators for foreign crashes.

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> The FAA is not a global organization, they don’t have oversight over any of the crashed aircraft.

The FAA has bilateral agreements with other countries and the EU for certification[1]. I read recently but can't quickly find in this that the FAA trusts EASA's certs for Airbus flying in the US.

The Ethiopian agency also trusts the FAA and EASA for this information[2]

So, it's not really tricky here, we can blame the FAA for the crash of a US manufactured plane in a foreign land (if the problem was the FAA's certification process).

[1] - https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/international/bilatera...

[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20180215175924/http://www.ecaa.g...

Edit: The entire point around these regulations is managing trust. Aircraft manufacturers are trying to build safe aircraft, the question is how much oversight is nessisary. EASA largely trusted the FAA and the FAA largely trusted Boing which they need to do. EASA can’t verify every bolt, they need to trust the manufacturer’s process to some degree.

So, EASA can’t really abandon blame as easily as they abandon responsibility. If they allow a flawed process to continue then that’s on them.

However, in this case these agreements still give EASA veto authority about what aircraft are allowed. Which is why EASA was able to ground these airplanes before the FAA did.

While in a de jure sense this is true, de facto the FAA effectively does have oversight over many (maybe most) commercial aircraft all over the world. Small countries in particular do not have the resources necessary to exercise meaningful oversight over every type of aircraft on the planet, and defer to FAA decisions in virtually every respect for Boeing and other American-made aircraft, and the US FAA and NTSB are involved in the investigation of virtually every incident involving a Boeing aircraft anywhere in the world.

Even larger, well-resourced geopolitical entities like the EU rely heavily on the FAA to do its job for Boeing aircraft, much as the FAA relies on the EASA to do its job for Airbus aircraft. It's not pure rubber stamping, but it's close enough that things like this can pretty easily happen if a manufacturer's home agency falls asleep at the switch.

An example of the FAA's influence: Airworthiness regulations are so closely coordinated that special numbering is used by Canada, Europe, and Japan to match the numbering of FAA airworthiness regulations for easy cross-referencing. The FAA is also delegated air traffic control responsibility for much of the world's international airspace by the ICAO.

It is basically impossible to fly a commercial aircraft on Earth without being under the – possibly very heavy – influence of US civil aviation authorities, and it would take a great many resources and serious, concerted political will by many countries to change that.

That just means FAA wasn't the only inept organization.

Blaming EASA/FAA/Boing etc feels good, but calling them inept becase they are not perfect is overstating things. Looking back it seems like an obviously bad call, but that’s hindsight bias.

I did not blame FAA, I was just pointing out why your logic was flawed. Just because the plane crashes did not happen in the US does not mean that the FAA may not be at fault. The FAA had approved the plane and it was operated the same way in Africa as in the US so it is just chance that none of the crashes happened in the US.

FAA has many regulations that most of Africa does not.

So, no they where not operated in the same fashion. It’s still been grounded in the US for good reasons, but you can’t take individual regulations in isolation.

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