Airlines and airline manufacturers also have vast financial incentives to risk crashes by taking minor shortcuts. That doesn’t exist for your drivers test.

That's not in the airline's interest because then the plane crashes and they lose a hundred million dollar plane and get sued and go bankrupt.

It could be in an individual manager's interest because then they get a bonus and are working for some other company by the time the plane crashes, but the airline itself has the aforementioned incentive to put processes into place all on their own to prevent that from happening.

Losing a brand new hundred million dollar aircraft is a huge hit. Losing a 50 year old aircraft is a different story, especially when the options are to retire it or keep flying. Further risking a crash when your airline is facing bankruptcy suddenly looks like a reasonable trade off.

It’s not like a major airline is going to intentionally crash an airplane, but if they can trade 1 billion dollars for an extra crash every 20 years that’s a net financial benefit.

> Losing a brand new hundred million dollar aircraft is a huge hit. Losing a 50 year old aircraft is a different story

A 50 year old aircraft still costs tens of millions, and the biggest cost of a crash is the lawsuits anyway.

> especially when the options are to retire it or keep flying.

50 year old planes fly all the time. The options aren't retire it or keep flying, they're maintain it properly or don't.

> Further risking a crash when your airline is facing bankruptcy suddenly looks like a reasonable trade off.

Which is where the insurance company comes in, and we're back to having an existing bureaucracy with an incentive to prevent that from happening.

> It’s not like a major airline is going to intentionally crash an airplane, but if they can trade 1 billion dollars for an extra crash every 20 years that’s a net financial benefit.

The value of a statistical life is generally regarded as being about ten million dollars. Times 300 passengers that's $3 billion. So that's how much they can expect to get sued for when the plane crashes, in addition to whatever the plane was worth. If they're "only" saving a billion dollars, they're losing money.

And if they could somehow save more than 3 billion dollars then that's what they're supposed to do -- at some point safety measures cost more than the value they provide and VSL calculations tell you where that is. (And if you don't think so then I assume you never travel by automobile or buy anything that has ever been in a truck.)

Insurance on older aircraft much like older cars drops because their worth less.

Your lawsuit numbers are also wildly off. Ex: “The US aviation giant has settled the first in a series of lawsuits filed by families of 737 Max crash victims. Boeing will reportedly pay $1.2 million to 11 families of victims killed in the 2018 Lion Air crash.“ https://www.dw.com/en/boeing-settles-first-lawsuit-with-737-...

No they're not. That's what they're supposed to get. If courts don't actually give families that then the problem is in the court system, not the company.

It doesn't matter where the problem lies. The value courts assign to life informs the airline when they estimate how much they would lose due to a crash.

It matters where the problem lies if you want to fix it.

Your argument is all "logical" but it does not agree with reality, the boeing 737 Max is a prime example.

Only then you're proving the other point just as much, because the 737 Max is also subject to the bureaucratic regulatory system being held up as an exemplar of something that works.

For 2 crashes out of 387 aircraft and several hundred thousand flights to be considered unacceptably dangerous suggests the system is largely working as intended. The aircraft had 0 fatalities in US or EU, globally an order of magnitude safer than driving, and it was still grounded.

Imagine if we took car safety so seriously.