This is the kind of crap that makes me think the US is in real trouble. It’s like “quagmire” has replaced “competency” across all our institutions, and there’s no escape.
The most important line of this article doesn't even pertain to aviation directly:
> Some perspective: In 1957, the U.S. hadn’t even launched a satellite. Twelve years later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. So unleaded avgas is a harder problem than a lunar landing? Perhaps you can enlighten me in the comments section.
It's happening everywhere, all industries. This infatuation with impeding progress in the name of organizational justification, budget numbers, or whatever - it'll be the death of us if we don't get it under control.
None of these things are good excuses to keep beating the same dead horse, that's not how progress is made. I also know that changing too many things at once can lead to issues so I'm not advocating for upending everything at once, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't start changing what needs to be changed.
Perhaps this is just my perspective and we may not agree where that start lies.
Risk intolerance, diffusion of responsibly, things like that as an abstract concepts tends to thunderous applause around here. So maybe a mirror would help us solve the problem.
what's needed is a meta-level risk budget and sane risk management, and in case of conservative industries (medicine, aviation, nuclear, blablabla) there should be a calculated and constant push to bias against stagnation, without fucking up the otherwise great safety record.
(of course this usually means a bit more in costs of managing changes, but that should be looked at in the perspective of opportunity costs of not changing to better processes/technology/structure/etc.)
When the execs at your software company asks you to explain a 3 week estimate to build a feature, you can sit down with your project manager, and build a GANNT chart or whatever, showing engineer A and engineer B doing design work for 1 week, implementation for another week, and testing the third week. In more detail, you could break down every team member's time spent by the hour actually writing docs, typing in code, waiting for it to compile, organizing field testing, and so on, and you can show exactly what physical activities result in the 3 week estimate.
I suspect if government agencies (or big companies) were required to produce an hour-by-hour breakdown of what individual people physically did through a project, you'd see a lot of "blocked on other team A finishing project B" or "waiting for executive Y to sign document Z" and also a lot of "picking my nose or playing golf, not doing my job."
Not in aviation they don't. Why? Because there are two certification bodies, FAA and EASA. Anyone who wants to fly anything in the world has to certify his tech with those two (unless it is used purely domestic, but than it can hardly be called aerospace or aviation). That includes Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, European and North / South American manufacturers.
The reason why certification standards are what they are is safety. Aviation became one of the safest industries for a reason. The 737 MAX debacle showed pretty well what happens when those standards are not adhered to. Is it a slow process? Sure it is, but it is what it is for very valid reasons.
The Apollo program also cost $25.8 billion between 1960 and 1973, or approx. $257 billion adjusted for inflation in 2020[1]. That's a full 5% of total government spending. That's an astronomical! amount of money to spend on a seemingly frivolous goal of upstaging the Spviet Union.
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026596462...
That way they can trade off speed of decisions vs quality of decisions.
ETA: Additionally, I don't believe any members of the FAA are elected, although possibly some are appointed by elected officials? Point being - taxpayers pay more, taxpayers get angry, taxpayers can't vote people causing them out of office for their inaction, FAA continues to do nothing
Then again, when the average US senator is generally disconnected from what's happening, controlling via the budget has its own challenges...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Administratio...
Sure, taxpayers pay ultimately, but that's not the important part. The important part is that taxpayers currently don't care. They don't really have a stake in this. They are indifferent, because they don't feel the huge torrent of opportunity cost of a slow regulatory agency going down the drain. Pay for delay would make this visible. It'd immediately help to put pressure on politicians, and that will make the executive branch much much much more responsive to these issues.
And yes, I think it would be good to put more concrete dollar numbers next to these lengthy processes. It would help legibility by making consequences clear(er) plus if there's a slight compounding by time,then it incentivizes resolutions. (Instead of the current system where applicants basically have one recourse, which is trying to sue the government.)
Lack of oversight and accountability is the real reason for delays. They get away with it because no one holds them accountable for actually producing something in a timely manner.
*I wish I could find it - there is an example of some government employees who were held personally liable for some environmental violations - despite them complaining to upper management that they needed to be addressed. Was pretty f'd up. I think they were civilian employees in the military (for some reason I'm thinking Air Force but can't dig it up at the moment). So if you are low enough on the totem pole your but may get in a sling - but it's amazing how little the upper echelons seem to take hits.
I feel this in my bones. I'm starting to feel this way towards living in the US in general
Now if you want to tweak it to their budget should get cut the longer they take to make a decision - that's something government agencies would *actually* pay attention to. About the only thing, actually.
The executive branch only ignores congress because congress refuses to do their job. They have the power of the purse but are loathe to use it. The 17th amendment was an utter disaster enabling the morass we are now in.