Which is exactly how a free market works. When there is a profit to be made from the sale of a product, so basic microeconomics theory goes, competitors will arise to undercut current players, until everyone's profit margin converges to zero. This mechanism is supposed to incentivize innovation and productivity improvements.
So not only is it NOT a free market (MASSIVE long-term investment plus enormous warranted regulatory burden), but we don’t want it to be one! Because we don’t ever ever want Boeing or Airbus to fail because that would be devastating to national security and safety etc.
All this is to say that “a race to the bottom” in this context is maybe more harmful than in other markets, because there really isn’t much backpressure (outside regulatory oversight) to keep standards high.