This is what institutional decay often looks like! They can still carry out a set of procedures allowing them to do the same thing they've been doing for a long time -- but they get less efficient, less flexible, more ossified. They are no longer the FAA that figured out how to oversee airline operations; they're the FAA that follows the script left to them by their predecessors. Collison gives a nice example:

> The avionics you see in cockpits are bafflingly primitive because it's so hard, slow, and expensive to get the FAA to approve new technology. As a result, pretty much every pilot flies with an iPad running sophisticated flight planning software -- their connection to a world that the FAA doesn't encumber.

There was a time when the FAA was much better at dealing with new technology. There was a time when all the technology in their purview was new. Something changed.