'Cozy' relationship between Boeing and U.S. draws scrutiny amid 737 MAX 9 mess

Software FAA DERs (boeing staff who "report" to FAA) were a factor in the MCAS-related crashes. There's vanishing few SW DERs these days.

> What could you possibly think average Americans could do about this if they did care?

Reach out to their congress-person (and other political representatives) with their worries. If that is hopeless a priori, please abolish the district system (which tends to cause a two-party system) asap and implement something that actually represents the people.

Mm not what the Boeing whistle blowers said. They decidedly ignored safety fails

Is it? Airbuse gross income: 50 bln, boejing: 60 bln. Net income: 5bln vs -6 bln.

Don't mess interest of organizations in general and particular individuals.

I'm sure many people in Boeing really care only about how to get required signoffs with as little effort as possible.

Yes, but it’s always a question of timeframe and personal distance. One of the insidious problems behind the modern MBAs’ veneration of Jack Welch is that GE always made its numbers, irregardless of the long-term cost to the company. If you’re in a position where your personal compensation depends on something going on a particular schedule, such as a huge sale of airplanes once a new model is approved, it’s going to be very easy to tell yourself that it’s “just”government red-tape delaying your cabin cruiser and the “safety Nazis” are just over-concerned. The odds are good that nothing will happen for years so you might not even be there when it happens, and complex failures usually mean there will be some complicating factors so the guys who made bad calls might be telling themselves that everything would have been fine if it wasn’t for someone else’s actions.

Somewhat in the same vein as what acdha says, but you're dealing with multiple goals and incentives, some ideological.

acdha covers the most important ideological obstacle: financialism. Basically, the notion that if you're good at managing money, you're good at managing everything[1]. This is itself an ideological proposition, ironically resembling the late-Soviet tendency to inject "marxist" or "socialist" into every branch of learning, because, well, if you know class dynamics, you know everything.

Some might say, "Regulation is good, we need a very large and meticulous government-managed safety group, because large capital projects with little safety margin require government involvement". The risk here is creating an unnecessarily hostile relationship with industry, which could increase scope until productivity falls below a theoretical floor. This is starting from "regulation is good", and it's going to want to prove the point.

Others might say, "government entities are ipse facto incapable of meeting goals, therefore we need to eliminate or decrease regulation so industry has greater freedom to establish safety practice." The risk here is when industry is operating under a different set of incentives (see, again, acdha's point on financialism), their goals don't align with value (reliability, safety, performance), but rather on the revenue, or even complex derivatives thereof. This is another ideological incentive, but there's a risk of a death spiral: regulation is bad and stupid -> shrink it -> bad things happen -> proof that regulation is bad -> regulation is bad and stupid.

[1] I'd posit that Welchian financialism is actually not even good at making money, over a risk horizon longer than a few years (or even a few quarters), but it's quite good at belching out cash in a very short term.

"New Spin on a Revolving Door: Pentagon Officials Turned Venture Capitalists" - https://dnyuz.com/2023/12/30/new-spin-on-a-revolving-door-pe...

If that's how they cut corners in civilian aviation, which is used by the public all the time, how can they cut corners when they deliver obscure military hardware that just sits in the warehouse waiting for WW3?

There is no guarantee that a country has to have a leading-edge aircraft manufacturer. On either the civilian or military side.

If companies lose too much money and don't receive bailouts, they simply cease to exist.

And you can't magic a new one on demand, given the specialized expertise and subcontractor requirements for something this complex.

So the reality is the government is stuck with a multi-variable optimization problem -- what combination of price, competition, and sustained R&D/production capability is best?

There is no easy answer. The modern, less-competitive, merged market is a deliberate consequence of the US refusing the spend Cold War levels of money to keep a larger number of manufacturers afloat.

>The rest of the world doesn't trust the FAA

Cool. So why did they approve the Max's initial design then? Are they corrupt too?

Europe certainly doesn't trust the USDA or FDA, at all, in any way

regulatory capture of the others don't cause a significant problem outside the US

when the sides start poping out of FAA approved airliners maybe trust of that agency should be re-evaluated

This is classic whataboutism.

The FAA isn't held to a higher standard, that's the entire point of this article and the discussion around it. We can and should oppose corruption in all government agencies, and if the FAA is where we can get enough will to start then so be it!

Commercial airline failures often lead to sudden and large-scale loss-of-life. I don't know that you can say the same for products and services regulated by the other agencies you mentioned.

I also don't know that I agree with your assertions. Do you have further evidence about FAA is held to such a higher standard than other regulatory agencies and how those other agencies failures are so much more frequent and have wrought so much more damage on the lives of the public?

FAA involves international cooperation whereas most of the rest handle only internal US matters.

Things that could be passed over in traditional wheeling & dealing of US politicians corruption won't fly (pun intended) because failures will get international consequences and scrutiny and tend to involve big medially visible tragedies (and not white collar crime or slow and unmarketable deaths of poor aka nobody important).

Noticeably, two times that president pushed a deregulation policy on FAA, the result was deadly accidents - DC-10 cargo door issues (Nixon) and 737 MAXX development (policy pushed under Bush Jr).

Additionally, FAA and related orgs elsewhere tend to take "regulations are written in blood" even more than regular pilots, and thus there's a drive to self correct even in face of problematic political reality.

Boeing squeezes Spirit to last cent and didn't care about QA.

Airbus apparently takes way more "partnership" approach to contractors.

Qantas flight 72… yea airbus is perfect derp

lol ok. I guess you pick Stocks with a roulette wheel.