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Comment by bob001 | Hacker News Reader

So most people not wanting to hear sonic booms to benefit a small group of high wealth fliers is bad?

Or having mandatory security checks in place after frequent accidents on supersonic planes is bad...

The aviation industry must be one of the most regulated ones and it's entirely necessary to guarantee the safety of passengers and crew. You don't see anyone complaining about it except Boeing who failed QA in the past couple of years and killed some hundreds of people due to their oversight.

Not to forget anyone below them. Aviation is one of the fields which can affect others in lot more than just immediate surrounding area. I don't live under much of flight path but still dropping planes and even parts of the planes are really not optimal.

It used to be that living next to an airport was hell due to noise even without supersonic jets. Then they regulated noise levels and magically airplane companies started to find ways to mitigate noise levels. Such a coincidence that suddenly innovation just happened then and not ealirer. Who can guess why.

Perhaps if the industry had been allowed to develop, we'd have some freaky ass new and innovative tech that would've abated the problem. The world may never know!

The industry was allowed to develop, but not allowed to cause harm.

Substitute develop with innovate and perhaps the thrust of my comment becomes more clear?

My reply still works when s/develop/innovate/. Companies were (and are) allowed to innovate in order to solve the blocking problems around supersonic flight. They just weren't allowed to ignore those blocking problems.

So basically "if they were only allowed to cause harm then maybe maybe one day they might have found a way to on their own for no profit stop doing that harm"? Yeah, no thank you. Also, all of corporate history shows that without a government or public pushback "will stop doing harm" never happens.

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