I'm hard pressed to come up with any other product which has as many complex interacting systems, requiring expertise in aerodynamics, materials science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, software, UX design among other things, with very little margin for error. Honestly they're kind of amazing.
It just means not 1st world (NATO countries) or 2nd (Soviet Bloc)
Also Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, and almost all of the Middle East.
As a quick summary:
Boeing is commendable on pushing China’s aviation industry to adopt international safety standards, as well as certain key Chinese individuals that wanted China to improve themselves and be on par with international norms.
The key here, is that the international norms and safety standards were established by the FAA and American industries. But to be politically neutral and more palatable, it was rephrased as “international standards”.
But, Boeing’s goal was to improve the safety of China’s aviation industry, in order to avoid being caught up in bad press for one of their planes crashing, because of poor maintenance. And they figured by improving the safety, more people in China would fly, and thus buy more Boeing airplanes. It was a nice virtuous cycle for Boeing.
The interesting thing, is that it appears the student has now become the master, and China adopted all the international standards from Boeing, and added more of their own, that they became even stricter, and more rigorous in their safety inspections and protocols. And over the past 2 decades, their statistical safety record is better than their international peers.
And also, the other fascinating thing about the history of Boeing. Their first engineer was Wong Tsu, and he designed Boeing’s first commercial plane, the Model C water plane. This was instrumental to Boeing’s commercial success. Wong Tsu was born in China, and studied at MIT during the dawn of the airplane age. It seems the United States and China have a lot of connections going back in history.
You can design a car with very little math. An airplane requires a lot of math. A spacecraft - everything is math, because the margins are awfully slim.
The Wrights are often dismissed as mere "bicycle mechanics", but they were anything but "mere".
I'm not trying to make it seem like car design is a higher class of work than it is, but a car designed with little math isn't going to run in any meaningful manner.
Margins/thresholds for design scope exist everywhere.
I've seen a lot of custom cars built. No math was used.