From documents I've seen (which I cannot find the links to now), it appears that the FAA let Boeing themselves do some of the certification work and sign offs.

Putting the foxes in charge of the hen house, so to speak.

They become primarily concerned with the interests of the companies they're regulating, rather than the public interest they're in theory tasked with working for.

Unfortunately, that is just how a regulated society works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

Of course, my post above is sharpened and overgeneralized to fit in an online forum. There are more nuances.

A current example in the news is Facebook asking congress to be regulated. This makes little sense from a conventional perspective. From the Regulatory Capture perspective it's an obvious play. Government regulation will be very costly to comply with, and only FB and a few other giants will be able to afford it, thus cementing FBs monopoly position for the foreseeable future.

https://www.insidesources.com/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-asks...

To be fair, Public Choice theory is certainly on the more controversial half of the subfields.

And of course you shouldn't blindly take some random post on this forum as complete proof of how the world works. That would be a foolish gullibility. Then again, completely rejecting it isn't the wisest thing either. At least that's my view :)

When has economics ever been a science?

But that's a small part of Economics, and the field in general is as hard as any science outside of physics, and had given us an enormous amount of insights we lacked 200 years ago, and contributed immensely to the relative peace and prosperity the world enjoys today.

just because a regulatory agency did its job by protecting the pulic’s interest doesn’t mean it will always work that way. so your example doesn’t negate the existence of regulatory capture, which is an actual thing and not some political propaganda.

So without regulations, there are fewer people to corrupt.

Private enterprise has an analogue: principle-agent problem.

This is some Challenger O-ring type of shitshow. Accidents are one thing; incompetency or, worse yet, callous indifference is absolutely unacceptable.

I think it's worse.

The first crash can be compared to the Challenger shitshow. It was a (massive) engineering mistake, which lead to the Lion Air plane crashing. Looking at the history of the 737 in general and the 737-MAX specifically it was rekless, but I'm pretty certain not intentional or foreseen by Boeing.

That massively changed by the fact that they didn't immediately pull the plane after this crash and went into deep analysis mode to really evaluate the cause. Instead they smeared everybody but themselves, developed a completely useless checklist without really knowing or (apparently) caring if it's useful at all and let that deathtrap fly.

The second crash, in my opinion is corporate mass murder for profit. Maybe not legally, but morally most certainly.

There is always a trade off, your statement is too bold for a world of limited resources. We can use engineering to make the roads safer. Spent a trillion USD on road safety will save lives for sure. But maybe it is spend better on cancer R&D efforts?

The safest plane would be the most expensive and most uncompetitive since it needs unlimited resources and unlimited time for being designed.

It's not so much a matter of ressources than of specifically engineering excellence. There's plentiful examples of a much better product that was created with less ressources than the shitty existing competition (this must be commonplace for HN members).

I'm convinced the safest plane is not the most expensive, it's the one designed through sound and clear-sighted engineering.

Are you an engineer? Your argument sounds naive. Or to give a counter example: In the Soviet Union there were likely more accidents (normalized) compared to the west. Yet, they did not focus on maximizing profits.

A simpler yet effective design (may it be initial or rework) comes at a much lower cost than a flawed one, which inevitably aggregates irrelevant complexities.

Who decides this? This is not a trivial question.

The F-35 fighter is a good example. Trades many disadvantages (not fast, not good in dog-fighting, tremendous long maintenance time, low payload etc.) for one advantage. The F-35 may or may not be invisible to an able opponent. But this decision is a tremendous difficult one. Based on your argument, it would be better to stick with a simple design. This was worked for the Soviet Union in WW2 (don't build the best tank, build a decent one, build many).

You may like this story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)

I'm not comparing simple vs. complex but rather sound vs. flawed, although often sound = simpler than flawed.

The 737 here is yet another example of this : - the MAX design is flawed : faulty risk assessment of MCAS, seemingly unstable airframe in some configurations - a likely sound design could be : airframe rework, thorough risk assessment, extra pilot training...

While the flawed design came at a lower initial cost, it will now overrun the cost of a likely sound one (further rework + retrofit + sales/reputation damage + legal), including the cost of a probable longer design phase in the latter.

(I concede that legal/sales costs are not directly technical debt costs).

I wish this statement was held with as much as accountability as this comment implies. But have any of the major outlets been discussing potential prison sentences for Boeing or FAA employees / executives or potentially even board members? If you want accountability in today's age it seems the pressure needs to be applied at the point where financial decisions are held with more precedent than safety of life.

Boeing stock was up today on the glimmer of hope that the "software fix was working". Investors are assuming the stock is on sale and this only impacts Boeing for, what, a few weeks? I said something similar in another comment but I think Volkswagen is going to do more jail time and have more brand detriment than Boeing or the FAA will. Egregious doesn't begin to describe the misdirection of conversation. Why is the focus not yet on who will be sentenced for death over profits?

Reminds me of the Equifax breach. Stock tumbles then recovers. Overall, it validates that breaches are not a liability; therefore, additional resources to address future problems could be seen as a moot point.

Same with Boeing. If there is no impact to the company, then why change the business model?

If you don't have food in your belly and you steal you get jailed. You are not satisfied with your million dollar salary and your billion dollar company profit and don't care if people get killed, you get to have PR firm write how sorry and sincere you are. Justice seems truly blind so many times just not in the way the phrase was coined.

And they're totally going go get a fair trial and not some sort of kangaroo court to appease the locals?

But I do get your point.

It's sad, but most faults seem to be like this. First one is treated as an anomaly, second one is treated as the start of a trend. It happens so many times I'm glad I'm not working with human lives.

That's just unrealistic. Unless you want plane and car rides to cost as much as a trip to space, after all, since everything would need to be engineered to that level of quality.

Anybody may have a different judgement with respect to exactly where on the scale is appropriate, but we cannot just pretend that there's no trade-off to be made. Or that absolute safety is even a possibility.

I said: "Accidents are one thing; incompetency or, worse yet, callous indifference is absolutely unacceptable."

Therefore, our medicine is not perfectly safe, our cars are not perfectly safe, our building are not perfectly safe, we don't / can't provide 100% health coverage to everyone, and so on... but in aggregate, they make the world a better place, so it's worth it.

"Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it"

It's been a couple of decades I think, maybe more, since an engineering screwup affected a passenger airliner like this. You could argue that the 787 LiIon battery thermal runaway thing was a red flag. That also resulted in an FAA grounding, but that was fairly easily remedied and nobody died.

I wonder if the European agency (don't remember the name) will stop trusting the FAA from now on and do their own tests. I'd thank them for that.

(According to what I read here, the European agency doesn't do exhaustive tests because they mostly trust whatever the FAA says; maybe that's false)

That's true. The FAA had a stellar record as a certification agency, which, it can be argued, they fucked in three days (sure, the hole history of this sad debacle is more complex. But by keeping the plane in the air longer than any other certification body in order to not hurt their buddies at Boeing they completely ruined their reputation, which was built in decades of good work).

I can't imagine that any responsible certification body anywhere trusts the FAA anymore without a complete and significant shakeup.

It's a sad story, really.

EASA.

FWIW, the Brazilian regulator (whose name I don't remember...) did not rubber-stamp the FAA's type certification of the 737 MAX, and required some differences training for MCAS, IIRC.

And, yes, the Ethiopian Air pilots apparently did follow the procedures initially, flipping the Stab Trim Cutout switches, but did not manage to recenter the trim manually (via the trim wheel), so apparently re-enabled electric trim, and then let MCAS drive the trim even further down to their doom. :-/

This is unlikely to change. It’s expected that some changes will occur at the FAA. Certifying an airliner is also a prohibitively expensive undertaking, which is part of the reason for this mess in the first place. It would take years even to train enough personnel to duplicate all those efforts.