Unusually for federal agencies, the FAA actually reversed course on this behavior and generally just tries to come down on egregious cases. People are encouraged to report on safety slips and near-misses using NASA as an unbiased intermediary. They've been known to be lenient towards minor negligence (ie. unintentional mistakes, airspace/runway incursions, etc) if the pilot recognized it and reported on it for the sake of providing stats for policy decisions.
All that said, more recently where the FAA has stopped, insurance has picked up. Insurance companies have been quick to jump on the availability of more sophisticated flight recording/tracking and the prevalence of social media to enforce their own views on aviation safety. Rates have been skyrocketing and it's becoming much harder to insure anything that isn't a simple fixed tricycle gear utility category certified 2-4 seater.
But then the checklist for pre flight is supposed to scare you into compliance, and that all these rules were created because it had cost someone blood. Many seasoned pilots blood too.
While this is off topic, from the original post and my reply - just confirming that inspectors at small aviation airports are very, very rare.
The only example I can think of is Microsoft and Apple alerting each other’s legal teams when defectors of the other try to sell secrets.
Did you mean NTSB?
This logic is how everything gets ruined.
You have a system which has caused air travel to have two orders of magnitude fewer fatalities than ground travel despite operating at much higher speeds, but the system doesn't prevent 100.0% of the evil.
Then the instance it didn't prevent is used to justify tightening the screws, even if that makes things less rather than more safe for the reasons discussed.
But like [1], I am still utterly confused about the whole self-certification deal.
The point of honor system isn't to put swift immediate justice on every infraction. It is to eliminate dishonest players from the long game.
If you are dishonest it usually is your modus operandi. You are not dishonest just once. When you get away with something once it becomes easier the next time.
But, as we say in Poland, lies have short legs. If you lie long enough you are bound to be caught one way or another.
The honor system means that once you get caught the punishment will be disproportionately painful, to make it impractical to be dishonest in the long run and to deter others from doing the same.
Now they're going to lose their status.
The FAA works on an honor system. If they chased people around looking for violations and fining people (which apparently they used to do) then people would try to circumvent detection, or avoid declaring an emergency and end up creating a bigger one.
They need transparency for things to improve, so they expect you to self report and they bring the hammer down if you don’t by hitting you where it hurts: right in the flight certifications.
From what I’m seeing it looks like Virgin didn’t self report before the news folks got wind and the FAA heard it through the grapevine, so they’ll get a big fat wake up call, and if that doesn’t get their attention then things will get much worse for them. Or, this is just SOP and an angle that sells ads and so it’s being hyped while nothing particularly egregious is happening from the FAA’s point of view.