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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I was just talking to an amateur pilot the other day and somehow this general topic came up.

The FAA works on an honor system. If they chased people around looking for violations and fining people (which apparently they used to do) then people would try to circumvent detection, or avoid declaring an emergency and end up creating a bigger one.

They need transparency for things to improve, so they expect you to self report and they bring the hammer down if you don’t by hitting you where it hurts: right in the flight certifications.

From what I’m seeing it looks like Virgin didn’t self report before the news folks got wind and the FAA heard it through the grapevine, so they’ll get a big fat wake up call, and if that doesn’t get their attention then things will get much worse for them. Or, this is just SOP and an angle that sells ads and so it’s being hyped while nothing particularly egregious is happening from the FAA’s point of view.

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Can second this. A couple decades ago the FAA was pretty tyrannical in their approach to compliance. Among other things they'd commonly stick inspectors at random airports and run through everyone's paperwork as they came in, handing out incredibly harsh punishments to anyone out of compliance. This garnered a lot of distrust from the community and lead to people devising ways of avoiding them as well as a general sentiment of hiding errors so they wouldn't get aggressively sanctioned.

Unusually for federal agencies, the FAA actually reversed course on this behavior and generally just tries to come down on egregious cases. People are encouraged to report on safety slips and near-misses using NASA as an unbiased intermediary. They've been known to be lenient towards minor negligence (ie. unintentional mistakes, airspace/runway incursions, etc) if the pilot recognized it and reported on it for the sake of providing stats for policy decisions.

All that said, more recently where the FAA has stopped, insurance has picked up. Insurance companies have been quick to jump on the availability of more sophisticated flight recording/tracking and the prevalence of social media to enforce their own views on aviation safety. Rates have been skyrocketing and it's becoming much harder to insure anything that isn't a simple fixed tricycle gear utility category certified 2-4 seater.

Thanks for the additional context, an honor system in regards to potential fines is fascinating.

The only example I can think of is Microsoft and Apple alerting each other’s legal teams when defectors of the other try to sell secrets.

> People are encouraged to report on safety slips and near-misses using NASA as an unbiased intermediary.

Did you mean NTSB?

No; NASA run a confidential notification and aggregated warning service for aviation safety incidents: https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/

I worked at NASA Ames and didn’t know that. Thanks.

Yep, no "more" Ramp Checks. They are pretty rare, the joke the CFI tell new students is if you know what you're doing, your foreflight/pilot license really is just a piece of "paper."

But then the checklist for pre flight is supposed to scare you into compliance, and that all these rules were created because it had cost someone blood. Many seasoned pilots blood too.

While this is off topic, from the original post and my reply - just confirming that inspectors at small aviation airports are very, very rare.

That honor system didn't seem to work very well on Boeing.

You're not wrong, though it's worth noting there are two different things going on there. In terms of operations (flying aircraft) the honor system makes sense. You want everyone learning from each others mistakes so you need to encourage a culture of voluntary transparency. That means you are actively trading leniency in exchange for transparency to keep everyone talking. On the other side, engineering, there are very well defined frameworks for how you design, fabricate, test, and certify airframes. There's an argument to be made for working to minimize the pointless red tape (and oh boy is there a lot of pointless red tap) but self certification in the ream of purely capitalistic corporations isn't the right play. Individuals can be convinced to care about reputation but corporations are so profit driven and carefully structured to avoid liability that it's largely pointless to attempt to map individual morality onto them.

Corporations aren't that carefully structured to avoid liability. The standard corporate charter in the united states limits it by default.

I took this to mean that the board will never explicitly tell you to break the law. They'll just make it impossible to carry out your job unless you do. Then, when the hammer falls you're a "rogue employee" that the company couldn't possibly have foreseen.

This. Corporations are cya machines. Also liability may not be prevented but meaningful punishment always seems to be avoided.

They are in terms of compartmentalization of orders, and "sentiment" that drives top-down issues, e.g. Wells Fargo account creation fraud.

> That honor system didn't seem to work very well on Boeing.

This logic is how everything gets ruined.

You have a system which has caused air travel to have two orders of magnitude fewer fatalities than ground travel despite operating at much higher speeds, but the system doesn't prevent 100.0% of the evil.

Then the instance it didn't prevent is used to justify tightening the screws, even if that makes things less rather than more safe for the reasons discussed.

Because people have recency bias, and using this as an anchor, argue their point of view (aka, their political beliefs), rather than argue for the truth.

I wouldn’t advocate getting rid of the honour system; it has proven to work for operating aircrafts.

But like [1], I am still utterly confused about the whole self-certification deal.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28399487

I feel honor system works pretty well.

The point of honor system isn't to put swift immediate justice on every infraction. It is to eliminate dishonest players from the long game.

If you are dishonest it usually is your modus operandi. You are not dishonest just once. When you get away with something once it becomes easier the next time.

But, as we say in Poland, lies have short legs. If you lie long enough you are bound to be caught one way or another.

The honor system means that once you get caught the punishment will be disproportionately painful, to make it impractical to be dishonest in the long run and to deter others from doing the same.

Boeing lost their honor.

Now they're going to lose their status.

If that was the case then they should be investigating Virgin for not reporting the issues rather than the actual failures themselves.

Oh wow, never knew that. Huh.

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