There was a small segment on Boeing recently and the industry as a whole on John Oliver’s show. Boeing being the main issue and how this company has repeatedly shit the bed multiple times since the takeover and shift of HQ to Chicago.
But one of the interesting facts I learned: the FAA has “regulators” that are paid by the airline industry themselves. This is largely due to how inexperienced the FAA is with the manufacturing process and thus rely on the industry to self-regulate.
Someone may raise an issue on the ground floor of these airline manufacturers. But the complaints are sent to people paid for by the airline manufacturers.
The conflict of interest is high. Yet FAA thinks this is okay.
The problem is real though. It stands to reason that the people that know how planes can be built safely are the one building planes; otherwise you could get in a situation where "those who know, build planes; those who don't, tell them how to do it".
There is a similar problem with financial regulation; my understanding is that the knowledge transfer between industry and regulation there is solved by the equally problematic "revolving doors", where people alternate between regulating and advising companies (and thus as regulators they don't want to make too many enemies).
Boeing merged with one of their competitors, and now outsource to subcontractors; both of these suggest the barriers, high though they are, are not insurmountable.
Also, the FAA could ask people from Lockheed to mark Boeing's homework.
The revolving door problem is mostly people coming back from a stint at a regulator to private employment at an salary that sometimes affect how beneficial their stint as a regulator was to the company hiring them post public service.
If that system was made one way so that people retiring from industry to government were forced to burn all "financial" bridges to the industry they were regulating by forcing them to accept a clause that they can newer go back especially not as a consultant a lot of those issues goes away.
Also many Americans - including many here on HN - reflexively oppose regulation. That's one reason regulator's budgets are cut (and now GOP-appointed judges are hamstringing the 'administrative state). And then when a private business does something wrong, the same people ask, 'where are the regulators'?
Exactly. The difference between a Boeing employee doing “regulating” versus an ex-Boeing employee who now works for the FAA doing the regulating is significant.
And then few years later we find out that the FAA employee is offered a 3/4 times higher pay in the company again..
Just like wall street executives getting in politics to regulate banking and then go back to highly paid positions or are paid millions in consulting fees for doing few speeches an hear.
Anyway I know that FAA investigators aren't necessarily from the industry (they are engineers in the field and can investigate the matters anyway), but I know little about regulators.
We can talk about management cutting corners and enforcing a culture all day long, and they should be prosecuted for their negligence... but that doesn't absolve the idiots that forgot to put the bolts in or the other idiots that can't drill a hole properly.
It seems kind of obviously foolish, like sure you can wind-down safety standards for profits, but in the long run making flying wildly recognized as unsafe would surely be so detrimental to profits of the entire industry. Except that they probably did the math and in many circumstances it's not like you can take the high-speed train instead anyhow.
At the beginning of commercial air travel people needed to be convinced by extreme levels of safety standards, we are now in middle of the slow process of transitioning to a point where airplane crashes are as commonplace as car crashes. We see more fatalities and more near-misses in the last few years. It's not just Boeing it's the entire industry, everyone is forced to do the same or you'll be uncompetitive.
But one of the interesting facts I learned: the FAA has “regulators” that are paid by the airline industry themselves. This is largely due to how inexperienced the FAA is with the manufacturing process and thus rely on the industry to self-regulate.
Someone may raise an issue on the ground floor of these airline manufacturers. But the complaints are sent to people paid for by the airline manufacturers.
The conflict of interest is high. Yet FAA thinks this is okay.