Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I'd be careful about over-regulation and liabilities (especially criminal liability). Such has completely crushed the general aviation business. This is why Cessnas flying today are all from the 1960s. Their engines require leaded gas, which is a big problem, but regulation and liability has made it impractical to develop a modern engine.

I.e. not only is innovation crushed by regulation, liability also prevents any new designs, because new designs always carry an element of risk.

Criminal liabilities mean people will do their best to deny it and cover it up, rather than fix it. The incredible safety of aviation today is not the result of punishing people who make mistakes.

View on HN

The idea that people shouldn't be charged with crimes because that makes them cover up crimes is pretty hard to grok.

We should also be careful of underregulation. Most of all, we should be careful of reflexive, reactionary, and/or partisan reasoning and decision-making. Part of that is this hypersenstive allergy to regulation that has people sneezing and coughing every time the idea is within a mile of them. That's arguably a reason for the Boeing situation.

Business leaders always clamor for less regulation because they have big egos (they cannot be constrained! also they must know more than the regulator), because sometimes there is a negative impact on their quarterly revenue, and because many have embraced an ideology. When things go to heck, then it would have been better to be regulated more - a situation Boeing is in now, and that financial markets seem to find themselves in every decade or so.

(Regulation also helps create a marketplace where you can focus on making better planes, not taking risks with people's lives to keep up with the other crazy competitors.)

> The idea that people shouldn't be charged with crimes because that makes them cover up crimes is pretty hard to grok.

I think the point is more about what we treat as crimes. My assumption is that the grandparent post is a reaction to the number of people in the comments here demanding criminal liability for the door plug issue, especially for Boeing executives, despite a notable lack of evidence of criminal actions (or actions that should be criminal) by Boeing executives or anyone else for that matter.

Charging people with crimes when there is evidence they've committed crimes seems like fair game, but the assumption that a crime was involved just because something bad happened seems like a bad approach to aviation safety. Maybe that's where this case will end up, but calls for it now seem wildly premature and likely to have the chilling effect the grandparent poster is talking about.

My point is not about deliberate criminal behavior (such as sabotage) but simply making mistakes. Designing and building an airliner is an incredibly complex undertaking, and most mistakes are "obvious" only in hindsight.

I recall one where the vent for dumping fuel turned out to be upstream of the cabin air intake. Eventually, an airliner needed to dump fuel, it was sucked up by the cabin air intake and the vapors blown through the cabin, and of course it blew up.

It sounds like "how could someone have made such a mistake!". The cabin engineers were a separate group from the engine people, that's how.

Another crash happened because a maintenance worker taped over the pitot tubes to protect them when the airplane was cleaned. He forgot to remove them afterwards. The tape wasn't very visible, and the inspection missed the tape. The airplane took off and crashed. The maintenance worker was prosecuted for his mistake. I felt sorry for the poor bastard - not only did he have to live with the guilt, but was jailed as well.

P.S. if someone in the aviation industry comes to work high or drunk, and makes a mistake while under the influence, I have no issue with prosecuting them.

> My point is not about deliberate criminal behavior (such as sabotage) but simply making mistakes.

I agree, but of course the difficult grey area is negligence; obviously some things are criminally unacceptable. The standard is sort-of 'should they have known better?' There's no easy, objective, logical map to an answer.

Criminal prosecutions of corporations and executives are rare enough that I'm not too worried about it being overdone, but of course there is the risk of emotional or crowd-pleasing decisions.

> they must know more than the regulator

Back when I worked on the 757 stab trim gearbox, I certainly knew far more about it than the regulators. There was just no way they knew every detail of it like I did. I also did all the math on it, and I was never questioned about it by the regulators. They never asked me a single question about any of it.

> Business leaders always clamor for less regulation because they have big egos

They often clamor for more regulation for the purpose of making it very difficult for anyone to compete with them.

> Regulation also helps create a marketplace where you can focus on making better planes, not taking risks with people's lives to keep up with the other crazy competitors

That's a self-contradictory statement. Making better planes is how you compete successfully.

P.S. The original reason for government medical certification of doctors was to push jewish and black doctors out of business.

See "Competition & Monopoly in Medical Care" by Frech https://www.amazon.com/Competition-Monopoly-Medical-Care-Fre...

Regulation is not always done in the best interests of the public. It's a blunt, and dangerous, weapon.

> Regulation is ... a blunt, and dangerous, weapon.

It is hardly blunt. It's enormously detailed in many areas, created by experts. We can find negative outcomes for any enterprise as m massive as regulatoin; in itself it doesn't mean much.

There are concerns and issues to consider, but this mass, very blunt :) critique and rejection of it prevents us from addressing them.

Certainly we are better off with the FAA regulating Boeing and the airlines than not regulating them!

> Certainly we are better off with the FAA regulating Boeing and the airlines than not regulating them!

Are we really? Then why all these Boeing fails? They are quite regulated and that's supposed to prevent them but regulatory failures abound.

I'd much rather have a strong free market where competition is keeping companies honest and on their toes. But one of the effects of regulation is reducing competition (through raising the barrier of entry).

Thus regulation becomes even more necessary to replace the lost competition... A self-fulfilling prophecy if you want.

> but regulation and liability has made it impractical to develop a modern engine.

Can you go into more detail about this? What regulation/liability specifically has stifled modern engine development? And is the answer deregulation? Or more carefully applied regulation of a different sort?

I think specifics are critically important for this kind of thing. General rhetoric is often “too much regulation” or “not enough regulation,” but what we usually want is “the correct regulation to align incentives,” which is often different for different cases.

I've seen discussions of the engine, about the regulatory barriers to designing new piston engines for Cessnas so the leaded gas can be dispensed with. Businesses don't want anything to do with changing anything at all about those airplanes.

This is quite an outlandish take. The safety of the aviation industry is by and large directly due to strict safety regulations, many of which Boeing pioneered before being taken over and financialized into the mess it is today.

New entrants in this industry need a ton of capital, made only worse by the monopoly suppliers in every single airframe sector. If anything, there needs to be more regulation to breakup these behemoths (or, prevent mergers like McDonnell Douglas and Boeing) in the first place.

> The safety of the aviation industry is by and large directly due to strict safety regulations, many of which Boeing pioneered

Isn't that rather self-contradictory? Having an unsafe airplane is bad for business. It put Lockheed out of the airliner business, for example (Elektra). Also DeHaviland (Comet).

"Don't tread on me!" replied the OP, as he designed an unsafe airplane and expected market forces to sort it out after people died.

> Criminal liabilities mean people will do their best to deny it and cover it up, rather than fix it.

Feels like this has been the status quo for Boeing for a few years regarding the 737 MAX. Actions with real teeth are required to incentive change.

You can hang people if you like, but you won't like the result. The aviation industry has not gotten as safe as it is today by whipping, hanging, or jailing people.

Even fixing a mistake is an implicit admission of guilt, and so people will not fix them. They will cover up and deny instead.

Real teeth don't require hanging anyone. It can involve things like mandatory FAA audits at random, and removing the ability for manufacturers to self-audit. It can involve the SEC delisting stocks from the exchanges. It can involve a government takeover of bad actors, removing the board of directors, and installing a board assigned by the FAA.

The penalties you're talking about are not criminal penalties.

Never said they had to be. Prosecutors can get very creative with plea bargains. Executives receive no punishment or admission of guilt, and in exchange, the FAA gets to make Boeing its playground.

Is this much different outside of the US, or are there similar levels of red-tape around developing engines/planes for GA there too?

Good question. I don't know, except that other countries often just rubber-stamp FAA regulations and adopt them.

The liability, in this case, is not about innovation, but about cost-reduction and outsourcing to a vendor with (allegedly) no audit and compliance controls.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com