EASA Insists on Testing Boeing 737 Max Itself Before Lifting Ban
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Lack of proper regulation (or enforcement) might lead to short-term gains in some economic indicators, but in the long term will lead to worse quality, relative decline of America comparing to other countries, and sometimes -like in this case- avoidable deaths of hundreds of innocent people.
> Americans get stuck with slow and expensive service that becomes relatively worse comparing to other western countries.
Internet speeds in most suburban, and urban locations in the US have dramatically increased as of late due to increased threat of competition (namely Google Fiber, which prompted AT&T to start heavily developing Fiber, which prompted the Spectrums of the world to increase speeds) and could be further accelerated by deregulation. Regulations are actually the primary reason that keeps cable companies in their monopolistic/oligarlistic positions.
As far as I am aware, the only western countries that have surpassed the US in internet speeds and stability for the majority of its populace are actually east, in countries like S.Korea and Japan.
Interestingly enough, Japan is mostly voluntarily self regulated.
So then why do big corporations spend so much time and money lobbying against regulation?
Regulation does set up barriers to entry, generally by definition. Needing to have lawyers e during compliance etc. is expensive. So $BIGCORP’s ideal position is regulation that they can absorb easily but smaller competitors can’t.
In general, the tendency in most European countries has been to force wholesaling and/or LLU, and set minimum standards for both; this has generally at least wiped out ADSL1. The FCC is somewhat lighter touch.
UK's utilities are generally quite good (despite grumbling), which I think is because regulators focus on creating frictionless marketplaces - ie, easy to switch, providers can't obfuscate costs, proliferation of comission-based switching services.
https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2019/2019-288.htm
Background - incumbent ISPs in Canada are required to sell last-mile access to third-party ISPs. Third parties pay a speed-dependent per-user access fee as well as an aggregated per-Mbit capacity fee which defines the size of the pipe at the carrier hotel where they interface with the incumbent network.
The incumbents were asked to provide rates they thought would be fair for wholesale access, as well as financial justification that those fees were reasonable. Their responses contained a range of creative accounting features and omissions. In response, the CRTC eviscerated the incumbents in their decision and cut the capacity fees almost in half, and set the access fees to a flat rate regardless of connection speed. They also made the new rates retroactive to 2016.
If the order stands (the incumbents are doubtless going to challenge it), we should be seeing some significantly cheaper internet options from the third-party ISPs in the near future.
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurnane/2017/08/14/speedte...
When they can get regulations that have that effect, then they are indeed in favor of them, but in this case, Boeing was doing all it could to avoid and subvert regulation in its haste to catch up with its competitor.
I'm a Canadian, in a super-simple business (no payroll, no significant hardward stock) and we are forced to spend double-digit percentages of our gross income just to stay "compliant" with regulations -- and our big, national-level accounting firm is still not certain that we are!
In my opinion, any small business owner that thinks they are complying with regulations is probably deluding themselves; one false step, one "investigation" by tax or regulatory authorities (of, if they get on the bad side of someone in these offices) -- and they are toast.
So, before you go about chanting in the streets for more regulation, think about who you're hurting.
Any company with an office tower, with several floors of lawyers and accountants is laughing at you, for being a "useful idiot", working on their behalf. They can trivially comply.
Because, remember -- they wrote the legislation. Your esteemed member of parliament or congress person doesn't write legislation. At best, they might adjust it after it gets dropped on their desk. The lobbyist, and the corporate lawyers and accountants who oversee them, wrote it, and gave it to your legislator.
I'm sure agencies such as the FAA or DOE might be more of a PITA to deal with. But that's because they're regulating functions that are literally life and death.
Unless they quickly cross this "chasm of despair", it is inevitable that the small business owner will simply give up and close the business.
Soon, all you have left is dead-eyed, heartless corporate strip-miners, laying waste the landscape (see: modern industrial livestock production and processing, vs. local farmers and butchers). And they have a very limited risk of any viable competitors crossing the chasm.
There is one thing that could change this -- remove the "economies of scale" for compliance to all regulatory and tax requirements. This means: the amount it costs the company to comply is calculated to be in direct proportion to their gross revenue.
If it costs a small business 10% of their gross revenue to comply, but it costs Apple, Eli Lilly, Exxon, Walmart etc. only .1% of their gross revenue, then taxes would be levied/refunded to ensure that the regulatory burden is equitable.
You would be able see the big corporation's lobbyists lining up in Washington, DC from orbit, to get the regulatory burdens on small businesses reduced!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/faa-knew-another-boeing-737-max...
I get 1 gig internet service for $80 a month in a mid-sized American city in the midwest. No complaints here. The offerings just keep getting better and cheaper.
Monthly public transport ticket 14.55 USD
1 ticket to the movies (adult price) 5.70 USD
High speed internet per month 9.50 USD
1 month gym subscription 41.30 USD
Of course, everything else in America is overpriced too, and you're not actually getting a better overall experience for that money. If it were an extremely safe, clean, and well-managed country, then it'd make sense for the cost-of-living to be high, but it isn't: gun violence is an epidemic, environmental regulations are being gutted, and the political leadership is utterly incompetent. And don't get me started on what an utter disaster the healthcare system is.
Like good luck seeing 10mbps+ to a server in the US. In the us I know my transfer speed is limited by the router I’m hitting. So I can go to .jp sites and still pull 30mbit
It wasn't until Google Fiber came into my area that everyone else starting offering competitive pricing, but the vast majority of land in the US is a high speed broadband wasteland.
So I don’t believe it is subsidy I fully believe it is competition. Google realized that it’s incredibly difficult and expensive to lay fiber and stopped. 5G realized they don’t need fiber to be competitive.
Competition always ends in a win for the customer
And you are right, it's not subsidies, it's engineered monopolies causing the problem which is why you see the competition actually working.
Google had to use microtrenching because they couldn't get access to existing rights of ways on telephone poles owned by other providers, mainly AT&T in my area.
Its really expensive to run an isp here
The threat to the FAA is external, they risk losing their worldwide stamp “if we validate it then the rest of the world do”. That means the long term damage they risk is much bigger, but the short term and political one is non existent, they just need to convince everyone that nothing happened and they’re back at their game. For the FAA either nothing change or they lose some standing and power, there is no path where they come out better than before.
The EASA complaints are internal, each country and the remnants of their own agency blaming them for accepting the plane validation from the FAA when it’s clear they shouldn’t have. Short term they look stupid, but either they go back to the old position like nothing happened, or they make themselves more powerful and independent compared to the FAA on such issue, possibly getting other countries outside EU/USA to listen to them as much if not more than to the FAA.
Up until now the word of the FAA may as well have been the word of god in that field, they risk losing it, and the EASA is in a good place to get a good piece of it.
So the FAA needs to downplay it as much as possible, and the EASA needs to instead make it into as much of a big deal as possible. Of course the EASA is very much helped by the fact that it was indeed a totally avoidable yet complete failure and disaster that, from a regulatory perspective, can be entirely pinned down on the FAA.
All they need to do is point at the fact unaltered, and say “the only way we can stop that from happening again is if you agree to give us authority to check all the plane ourselves without automatically accepting the FAA approval”.
I just hope it will give us better oversight, Boeing, Airbus, newcomers from China etc ... We can’t afford so many death for such stupid reasons. The max fiasco is really an insult to the entire industry, and I’m sure many “older” people in Boeing feel ashamed of how far their company has fallen.
Trump government seems to sell influence in government organizations to companies they are supposed to oversee, so I don't know if Stephen Dickson is step for better or worse.
But I don’t think this will happen, the FAA seem to have realized how angry the rest of the world agencies are. 350 dead because they screwed up, and their first reaction was to say it was the dead pilots fault...
When the wall came down in Eastern Germany, we tuned into Knight Rider and MacGyver. The A-Team and the Power Rangers were on and life seemed to change for the better as the German East experienced American liberalism after decades of authoritarianist socialism.
I glorified America growing up and as a 11 year old. In 2000, I was more excited to see the Statue of Liberty the first time than for any Christmas before. Nothing came close to seeing the city of my childhood heroes (the Ghostbusters) and seeing WTC/Empire State when driving in from JFK.
But 9/11 happened and somehow America sold its soul. Not that Gulf War or Vietnam didn't happen, but it changed everything about the tiny bits of the amazing USA that I had always imagined. Post-9/11 I ended up living for nearly 6 years in the US and all the problems became apparent to me as a growing teenager. America was not nearly as great as propaganda made it out to be.
Back home in Europe, I never once worried about health. Going to the doc was normal and expected. Emergency procedures were performed without a second thought to cost. In the US, I was billed $800 for 3 stitches when I cut my thumb (deeply) and I got lucky because university ambulance transported me.
In Europe, in my hometown of around 1 million people, I got into problems with bullies and ran into thieves/thugs and it definitely sucked.
But in the US, I experienced muggings at gun point, one mass shooting (~13 dead), one fatal stabbing on campus, one robbery in my SO's home, arson in the house across my street and one meth lab explosion... it felt absolutely surreal (happened all in Binghamton, NY - not really a prime example of a blossoming economy, I know).
In classes, people were overtly concerned with political correctness and yelled at Middle Eastern history professors for using specific "offending" terms. Also, excluding God from the evolutions lecture was a highlight. Every single international student felt cringe and embarrassment when that Midwestern girl yelled at 300 people that evolution is just a theory and intelligent design ought to be taught with as much dedication and she feels offended.
Personally, America often felt like it was run by corrupt cronies who torpedoed education where ever possible. College is a for-profit business rather than an investment into the next generation of citizens. It felt so weird and I think the social cracks that were apparent 15 years ago are now leading to structural failure in society.
There are many smart and capable people in the US. Whether they did amazing stuff for their local hospital, took part in the Apollo program or engineered comms for Lockheed Martin. I met so many amazing folks. I hope that their rational influence can be stronger again.
Now I will go back and concern myself with Europe's own massive problems. I carry the US in my heart, as I lived there for half a decade. I hope that the country is in a local minimum right now and that the path out is already in view.
When I was younger I thought I really needed to go and see the USA. Then 9/11 happened and it started to go down. These days I feel sorry for probably not being able to see the US and the landscape and whatnot that is great about it, but I really can't stand the political "atmosphere" and how this influences the whole world in a negative way.
I was billed about that much, also in "Europe", when an ambulance was called, no treatment was performed on me, and I wasn't even transported by the ambulance. This was in Switzerland despite having health insurance. There's no general European health insurance system.
This is like traveling to Belize and complaining that they don't speak Spanish.
EDIT: Also, for the record Switzerland does observe the EHIC system so health insurances from EU/EEA countries are valid here and vice versa, so your example of Belize isn't even accurate. Switzerland isn't in the EU/EEA but has a series of bilateral treaties which harmonize many things such as this, research funding for EU projects, freedom of movement of people, etc.
In case anyone is curious, this appears to refer to the following event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binghamton_shootings
The fact Ethiopa insisted on sending the flight records for their MAX 737 crash to Europe and not to the US shows some serious loss of trust in the FAA had occurred.
And that was not helped when the USA was the last country to ground the aircraft.
This is strange wording to me. There's nothing inherently wrong with blaming "dead people" for something, because many accidents caused by user error result in death of the user. However, in this situation, it certainly seems rather hasty and inappropriate.
The purpose of accident investigation is not to fuel Americans' apparently insatiable appetite for revenge, you already have plenty of means for that, the purpose is the Prevention of Future Harm. Why Future Harm? Because we don't have time travel.
You clearly won't prevent any future harm by blaming anybody, whether alive or dead. To prevent future harm you will need to change what is done or how.
Almost invariably‡ the Right Thing™ will be some mix of procedural changes and engineering changes. For example ensuring that the right staff are empowered to stop something that's a bad idea being done even if senior management are short-sighted enough to demand it.
So the result is never "Bob is to blame because Bob did X" but rather e.g. "Bob did X. The Foozle should be modified to prevent doing X" or "Bob did X. Company policy did not say that doing X was forbidden. Change policy to forbid X".
‡ I've written about this before on HN. The one investigation report I've seen that did _not_ have any actionable recommendations was into an accident where two people died when their fishing boat sank. The cause? They'd taken so much heroin they couldn't operate the boat safely. Why no recommendation? Using heroin is already illegal. Using any intoxicating substance while in charge of a boat is already illegal. This was already obviously a terrible idea.
The problem is to put out an accident incident report blaming the "dead people" to only then find out the report was 100% wrong.
I don't blame them, given how Boeing had previously tampered with crash evidence[0].
From the article on the investigation of the crash of Flight 585:
>Walz, of Parker Bertea, was assigned to hand-carry the servo valve to Irvine. John Calvin, the quality-control engineer from Boeing, instructed an assistant to pack up the parts. According to court records, the assistant left the room and returned with a taped package, which he handed to Walz, who carried it on a flight to Southern California.
>When Walz opened the package that afternoon at the Parker Bertea plant, he discovered that three servo-valve parts were missing: a spring, spring guide and end cap.
>Boeing, citing ongoing litigation, has never explained why those three parts were left out of the package forwarded to Irvine.
The world ignoring anything the FAA has to say about anything is a stance that's long overdue.
> The world ignoring anything the FAA has to say about anything is a stance that's long overdue.
I don't see how the second part follows from the first. Can you elaborate on how regulatory capture by Boeing affects FAA regulations on everything they do?
Of course, outside of the specific domain of approving Boeing designs, if the FAA says something isn't safe, or produces a report on a crash or suchlike, the world may want to pay heed.
Time for them to reap what they've sown.
That's your takeaway of what happened?
My takeaway is that the president 'intervened' only after it was clear that the combined Boeing/FAA/US position became untenable after other regions local air authorities and airlines declared the plane unfit to fly.
Trump threw the FAA under the bus to make himself look good, but the weeks before he was pressuring them to keep the planes flying on behalf of Boeing.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/03/surprise-trump-kept-...
I guess that's one good thing about having a narcissistic President who only cares about his own ego: he'll happily change course if it suits him and makes him look good, instead of digging his heels in.
I can’t believe they haven’t got a plan yet!
There are explicit agreements between the EASA and FAA in order to reduce duplicated work (https://www.faa.gov/news/updates/?newsId=88965)
This is extremely bad. It it will be bad for any US regulated product used in EU markets like food, medical devices and equipment, pharmaceuticals, among others.
From your link: each entity performs a “validation” of certification activities.
edit: not precisely my area of expertise, so corrections welcomed
I wouldn't be surprised if more and more other countries start looking into approvals from US agencies, and investigating how independent those agencies actually are :-/
Share price may have benefited for a few decades, but Boeing's image will be tarred with this for quite a few decades with far higher certification costs worldwide in numerous jurisdictions. There are many potential jurisdictions [1] looking out for their own interests, and may choose to defensively force a certification on Boeing instead of trusting the FAA.
That will cost Boeing a lot of money. If the 737 line is continued at all, every single 737 variant that comes out after this will have a really steep hill of sales objections to climb, and they'll be handing out steeper discounts and lower profits to counter those objections. It may turn out that accepting an adversarial relationship with the FAA instead of lobbying to co-opt it was the optimal profit strategy in the long-term.
If it pans out this way, then the optimal profit strategy is to encourage the most stringent regulatory regime in the corporation's home country that all others hold up as the gold standard and follow without question. This avoids the multiple costs individual certification efforts rack up because no one can trust each others' certification results because they all recognize they're too weakened by industrial lobbying efforts.
A strong, quasi-centralized regulatory body then acts as the company's buffer to buy the benefit of the doubt, an insurance policy against a prolonged period when the company's culture is called into question.
As this pustule of a scandal more and more pops out it turns out that Boeing essentially rubber stamped its own certificates.
I'm not sure about the level Airbus is allowed to do that.
Do you think it should be the other way around in tit-for-tat political reasons? Or because "Many eyes makes all bugs shallow" or some other reason?
The timeline for a new plane is already measured in years. Another 6 months can't be that bad, right?
To quote Ronald Reagan, "Trust but Verify".
For example, as an Australian law student, I read Marbury v. Madison, which was held persuasive in Australia because of the direct influence between the US constitution and Australian constitution. Another case with enormous worldwide effect is Donoghue v Stevenson, which was the beginning of modern Torts law.
And has been for more or less 20 years.
On the other hand, can we expect US trade sanctions against the EU in response to this move?
https://www.easa.europa.eu/the-agency/the-agency
OP offers no hint just how such great additional effort is to be paid for.
Air transport safety supervision and regulation should be paid for by those using it, ie by taxes on the end user.