And yet, over that time, airline travel has become unprecedently safe. I think it is reasonable to assume that the FAA can function effectively in this manner, if (and only if) it is adequately funded for that role, and its independence is respected and protected.

Air travel has gotten much safer over the past half century and an usually high percentage of 737 Max aircraft have suffered a complete hull loss with all passengers and crew dying. As has been mentioned before "past performance is not predictive of future results".

As best as Wikipedia can tell me, Boeing has delivered 130 Max's which flew ~120,000 flight hours. Even if we completely disregard all MCAS failures that the pilots were able to mitigate, two 737 Max 8's were destroyed within the first two years of operation, representing ~1.5% of the aircraft actually in operation in two years. That is a pretty alarming statistic, and points to the Max 8 genuinely being an unsafe aircraft.

This is an example of why humans are terrible at evaluating risk that comes with a time lag. Airline travel was becoming safer on regulatory standards and decisions probably made for the most part 20 years ago at critical design stages of the current fleet of aircraft.

"Past performance is not a predictor of future results."

I still upvoted your comment even though I disagree with the sentiment because I see this a lot when risk management is considered by many. Unless risk management is your domain expertise, or you've been to lots and lots of different organizations to observe what works and what didn't, it is a very human perspective.

Risk management is not performed by saying, "Nothing bad has happened even less, therefore let's keep with the status quo or make it more lax to save money." Reactive risk management based upon the rear-view mirror is a great way to invite extinction-level tail risk into the organization's house.

We could play an exciting game of Cognitive Bias Bingo [1] with such a perspective, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Boeing was just coasting before the MBA's damage came to fruition.

The FAA didn't even want to ground the Aircraft. It was completely reactionary after every other jurisdiction did and was reportedly demanded by the president. They are fundamentally untrustworthy, they thought 2 fatal crashes were not worthy of grounding a brand new design.

No, that's delegated to ODAs paid by and reporting to Boeing managers, which is the systemic problem.

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

The FAA relies on certification paperwork, which was falsified for the 737 MAX.

So the FAA was completely cut out of the certification process.