With regard to the routes they could fly and the prices they could charge, yes. But they were never de-regulated with regard to the safety requirements they had to meet or the qualifications their pilots and crew and maintenance workers have to have. Those regulations have, if anything, gotten more stringent over time. And those regulations pose a huge barrier to entry for new competitors, and favor large airlines over small ones because a large airline can more easily absorb the costs of compliance.
I'm honestly not sure how "we can't legally commandeer the plane to transport military personnel in wartime" qualifies as a national security issue. Seems more like a logistical issue in that unlikely event.
Safety and security issues are handled separately. Some foreign airlines are banned from landing at any US airport because they're not trusted.
Have you seen the EU airline market? It's _insanely_ competitive with dozens of airlines flying everywhere, all with rigorous safety standards.
This is the problematic false dichotomy. If you give someone a choice between "this specific set of onerous, expensive, competition-destroying regulations" or "you will be killed", they make the obvious choice.
But those aren't the only options. Existing regulations are poorly optimized. It would be possible to save the same number of lives -- more lives -- by doing more work to improve the benefit:burden ratio of regulations.
The problem is that people aren't interested in this. It's detail-oriented work that doesn't make for good sound bites, so the beneficiaries (the general public) aren't organized enough to know how to ask for it, and the organized incumbents don't want it because it would result in a larger number of viable competitors.
And it's too easy for incumbents to make the sound bites go the other way, by pretending that not spending a billion dollars to save one life is irresponsible, even though the same billion dollars could save more than a thousand lives if saved here and used beneficially somewhere else.
Sure. The air traffic control system is 20th century technology that has air traffic controllers doing things manually that could be done by computers. A better automated system would have the same or better safety while requiring significantly less labor.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/05/september-11-r...
> However, Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, a German academic specialising in risk, has estimated that an extra 1,595 Americans died in car accidents in the year after the attacks – indirect victims of the tragedy.
Should the airline industry become more like the software eng industry, which has had such great success in producing solid and safe products?
Safety is not a binary variable: it's a trade-off vs economical factors and the cost of each ticket. Since some people have to fly anyway, this means decreased spending in other areas of the economy.
You can't just drop an argument destroying bomb like this with no citation
Not sure you can make such a claim. There are other industries where standards and safety practices improve over time without the need of strong regulatory leadership. Case in point: occupational injuries have been decreasing over time across the board:
I'd favor mechanization over 'rational human' for sure.
https://www.slideserve.com/wauna/we-need-to-continuously-imp...
Ekianjo is right, in the sense that entities with lots of capital will become rent-seeking entities in over-regulated/mis-regulated markets because of very high barriers to entry. Examples include ISP's and insurance markets.
You are also right, in the sense that entities will rush to control a heavily de-regulated market. To that end, companies with lots of capital can afford to outspend or acquire their undersized competition. Examples include Air-transit post-1978 and the Internet 2.0.
There isn't one single legislation that led us here and there is no one-size-fits-all solution that can solve each monopoly. We have to evaluate each industry and each market on its own to determine how the state would break the oligopoly.
Except airlines were heavily deregulated in 1978. In my mind it's also "clear why we have reached this point", except that I've come to the opposite conclusion that you have.