This might be too hot of a take for HackerNews, but... look at how many people the FAA has kept safe over the past 30 years. I'm pretty sure the number of people who travel without dying is very, very high. I don't disagree that their might have been some ineptitude (I'm sure you could find that anywhere for anything since it's opinion driven), but to say the FAA is all rotten because 346 died is kind of dramatic when millions have been kept safe.
In reality, major changes have been made to the way that the FAA operates and delegates authority in a series of sweeping changes since 2005 that were largely meant to cover for the fact that Congress has been severely underfunding the FAA.
The MAX is one of the first models we’ve seen wholly designed and manufactured under this new process. (substantial amounts of the underlying safety analysis of the 787 happened under the old setup)
One major change that may be relevant in this case is that whereas Designated Engineering Representatives used to do safety analysis work at Airplane manufactures in a completely parallel, firewalled cross-cutting engineering group that effectively reported directly to the FAA in a quasi on-loan model, “in order to reduce costs” the FAA allowed this to be scrapped and replaced with “Airworthiness Representatives” embedded in, and crucially answering to, the regular engineering management at the company. Company management then acts as middle-man to the FAA. AR Management at say Boeing is nominally supposed to act as independent of Boeing and represent FAA opinions, but in practice routinely pushes back on FAA requests and acts to represent the interests of Boeing management: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/delegating-aircraft-sa...
So previously if day-to-day engineering was under pressure from a manager to ship a software subsystem or complete a component design, these deadlines were unrelated to the DERs, who operated in their own safety-focused management chain under the FAA.
Now, the AR is under the same manager and pressures as everyone else to hit the ship date. It is unsurprising that quality of analysis might take a back seat to job security in such a setup.
It does not make much sense to defend the FAA by pointing at successes produced by processes that were no longer in place by the time the 737 MAX engineering programme began.
It's incredibly dangerous to propose changes to the FAA, given how much of an unqualified success they've had over the years at keeping flight safe. Don't let y our populist rage kill probably one of the best/most successful government institutions the US has ever created.
That is an incredibly ironic thing to say, because these deaths are a result of changes to the FAA, specifically, the delegation of the FAA's regulatory authority to the company being regulated. That this would not end well was easily foreseeable because it's such a blatant conflict of interest.
I was using the word in this sense:
"Irony: a literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character's words or actions are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character."
Your fake choice of definition is even worse than what you actually meant.
All the world’s indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another’s audience
Outside the gilded cageThat doesn’t sound like an argument anyone would intentionally make.
They’ve done good work, great. But these two incidents represent a fall from grace, and both organisations should be pilloried for that incompetence especially because they have a history of high standards.
An important quote from her book "Engineering a Safer World" section "Questioning the Foundations of Traditional Safety Engineering":
"Old Assumption
- Major accidents occur from the chance simultaneous occurrence of random events.
New Assumption
- Systems will tend to migrate toward states of higher risk. Such migration is predictable and can be prevented by appropriate system design or detected during operations using leading indicators of increasing risk."
So it's: either the organizations are themselves able to keep the risk from increasing (as quoted, that is even "predictable" and of course it "can be prevented") or there have to be the external influences in that direction.
In this case, the organizations themselves failed.
And yes the numbers are not the only relevant issue. It is the manner in which the original certification was done, the failure to act swiftly after the first crash, and the inordinate delay in acting even after the second crash which together seem to paint the picture of an organization which puts the interest of the manufacturer above passenger safety.
The 737 MAX additionally has a tendency to pitch up when pitching up. The more you pitch the aircraft up, the more it wants to pitch up. As you pitch up more and more, you'd like the required force on the controls to increase, but in the 737 MAX it would naturally decrease.
Thus there is a discrepancy between your perspective / opinion and the typical way that the NTSB and FAA operate: this is precisely the time to address any issues.
It's somewhat abstract, but it's an interesting question to me, which is why I asked. Does the FAA's authority to regulate aircraft construction come from Congress specifically delegating authority over aircraft construction to them- or does the FAA only effectively have the ability to control construction because they can prevent the aircraft from flying in US airspace?
FAA's reputation alone was good enough for other aviation authorities to accept its certification of Boeing's MAX 8, which is why the FAA matter despite happening way outside its jurisdiction.