The alternative requires raising costs and slowing progress and innovation, which is a nonstart in a competitive environment such as Boeing vs Airbus.
So why not reformulate it correctly. In my ideology, it is not possible to solve this problem.
If that ideology would be out of the way, it could actually be tested pretty good via unittest running a simulation. So once developed those tests would actually be pretty cheap to run.
Its just this ideologic blindspot that prevents good safety.
Well money and time.
You speak as if you think that if only the great billionaires accepted a little less money then we could have safety.
How many lives are you willing to lose for a multi year delay to accommodate the FDA recreating every required test that the pharmaceutical company did? How many lives are currently lost because the current system doesn’t work?
Your suggestion is akin to voter id’s as a requirement to prevent voter fraud. How many legitimate voters are going to be prevented from voting due to the new rules to stop how many prior confirmed cases of voter fraud?
This isn’t a lack of resources. This is society deciding that the resources are better used elsewhere.
* Actual decisions on resource allocation made by regulatory agencies, which have a close partnership and history of employment with the industry being regulated.
It's different to say "society decided" vs 'a specialized subset of society, with tangled incentives, decided.'
At the end of the day, it's a spectrum from (no oversight) to (full, independent validation).
Boeing didn't want MCAS highlighted as a change, Boeing didn't want the FAA to independently discover it, and Boeing got all these things. Either by action on its part or by design of what the FAA did and did not independently verify.
That's a strong indicator we should shift regulatory posture further towards (full, independent verification). And while it may be cost prohibitive to shift all the way there, that's doesn't mean we can't shift closer to it.
The problem with the FAA vs Boeing is not that the system is designed around the (correct!) assumption that the public's and FAA's interests, on one hand, and Boeing's interests on the other are aligned. This failure cost Boeing enormously!
What was not aligned were Boeing's interests and Boeing upper management interests. The pervasive failure of our society to force CxOs to align with the companies they run and with society at large is much bigger than just in aviation.
That some pilot was indicted, but not the management he was responsive to, is a glaring indicator of this failing.
Unfortunately, they did not work as hard as they should have to ensure that it would not malfunction. Or to make sure if it did pilot's were aware and had a chance to develop muscle memory for it.
All of that was Management's push.
If the FAA had paid attention they would have seen a company desperate to compete modifying numerous basic characteristics of an airplane to the point of making it aerodynamically unstable, using a flight control system as a bandaid to fix this.
Not to mention being such massively cheap assholes that they literally didn't install warning lights in the cockpit to tell the pilots when the sensor their flight computer would use to override control inputs, had failed.