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Comment by Thorncorona | Hacker News Reader

The irony of Boeing complaining about favorable treatment by the government is palpable.

Other countries are going to start ignoring FAA safety rulings now, so meaning that in exchange for a short term monetary gain a bunch of politicians and executives will probably cause significant long term costs - although the people who made those decisions and took those bribes won't have to pay for those consequences, they've already got there's :-/

This is some weak logic. So a super-high capital business like an Airline is going to flaunt aircraft safety rules, potentially risking hundreds of lives of their customers and employees... to what exactly? Buy some cheaper uncertified Chinese(?) aircrafts or fly other certified aircrafts unsafely...to make a little extra money? And then run away when the lawsuits and families of the dead come chasing you?

There’s already evidence that the FAA had internal pressure to devolve regulation authority to Boeing in order to speed up certification and release to compete with the A320neo. That’s part of the reason why the MCAS system was allowed to listen to a single AoA sensor instead of two, and possibly why Boeing was able to get away with not training pilots on the new MCAS system.

Cutting regulatory corners is a lot more complicated than “buying cheaper uncertified Chinese aircrafts”, and it’s completely invisible to the general public until an incident occurs.

No, it was explicitly because Boeing wanted to be able to short circuit the normal safety analysis in order to get a poorly designed product to market to compete with the airbus a320neo.

The level of trust in the US aeronautic safety agencies can be summed up in other countries explicitly requiring non-US investigators.

That is the long term impact I'm talking about - it seems entirely plausible that this will become the norm rather than the exception it is now.

How many time it has to happen until we learn it. Every time an industry is left unwatched crisis happens because there is always short term monetary gain for a bunch of executives. It was the same thing with SCC going blind about big banks before 2008. FAA - Boeing relationship is an example of SCC - BigBanks relationship before 2008.

this is (slightly) less of a problem in other countries than the US. The real problem in the US is that after they demonstrably screw everyone else over, politicians pass many questionably effective laws - and then immediately start rolling it all back because "regulation hurts Americans".

In the EU GDPR was a response to the abject failure of companies to actually self regulate - there was an actual consequence of a failure of self-regulation: the GDPR adding financial penalties for abusing consumers.

If the companies had actually self regulated, and actually self-limited their collection of data, and if only they hadn't sold off everyone's data to anyone and everyone, then they wouldn't have to deal with the GDPR.

So if the companies think it /is/ too aggressive, they've only got themselves to fault.

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