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Comment by ReptileMan | Hacker News Reader

In their best year so far they delivered 400 planes. That is 15 years of production.

If Boeing went and delivered all of those planes in the next year or two it would be a disaster for the airline industry. There are so many orders only because airlines are planning out for a decade or more and are slotting in replacements for when they project their current airframes to age out.

The airliner industry is overdue for a disruption at this point. Corporate consolidation has left too few players to get proper competition. Unfortunately the airliner industry is so heavily regulated that even a crazy billionaire would have a tough time breaking in.

The industry is heavily regulated for good reason: safety. And there was a time when it was even more regulated: routes were assigned.

Those safety regulations don’t seem to have worked very well in the case of Boeing.

Well, we don't really know that.

We have a pretty good idea, after the MCAS fiasco and now planes with missing bolts.

The FAR's weren't the problem. Self-regulation by the manufacturer was. Bring back adversarial FAA inspectors.

Self regulation is no regulation at all. In Italy we have an expression for when you ask about the quality of the product to the very same person that sells it: How's the wine, innkeeper? Fine!

Thousands of new inspectors on a 15M part article, one a day.

We need adversarial gov't inspectors for the software industry. The financial and privacy impact is much greater.

The key point is that someone else besides the manufacturer must hold the key for final approval. And they mustn't be governed by an incentive structure specifically tooled to induce rubber stamping. Which is exactly what self-emfprcement by the manufacturer incentivizes.

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