how much smaller was Boeing (and the whole aviation industry) back then?
Most of us work in tech. Imagine an auditor coming in and trying to sort out if one of the most complex systems at your company is "safe." What's safe? Every previously known failure mode and every new one you're going to be blamed for when it happens.
Which is fine for low states they deal with and not fine with planes.
MAYBE, MAYBE the insurance company assessments/audits are kind of related to what you are talking about. But not really. But not the FAA ones. They are such a different beast with so much brain power involved along with people with a combined centuries of experience in this stuff, it's hard to explain without being around it.
There's so many moving parts to aircraft certification honestly I was surprised when a new design would get type design certification. Which is why Boeing tries to do things like shoehorn in a new airplane under an older airplane type design (MAX) so they don't have to get a whole new type design approved.
You're correct in that the FAA can't (or at least, it would be wildly impractical) have a staff of in-house experts that equal or exceed the experience of the manufacturer engineers on every possible topic.
But, that's not necessary to enforce a process of quality. It can be done by enforcing that the company must establish and document the processes to ensure quality, including which experts need to sign off on what. Then the FAA needs to hold the engineers who sign off professionally responsible and their managment legally liable if any circumvention is discovered down the line.
Having seen how quality processes work, it's really not a substitute for competent oversight. You can have a crap design and get all the paperwork is completely 100% in order, in fact the paperwork then makes it a lot more time consuming and expensive to fix the design!
You have no ideea.
It's sooo extremely easy to fake everything! I'm working with ISO15189 right now. I could just fill paperwork saying I did things that I didn't really do. Nobody could tell the difference. Sometimes there's an audit. It's announced months in advance and they only just look at the paperwork. I'm the only one here that knows the analysers have trace logs and how do get/print them. Some of those logs are just CSV text files. I could fake those too.
According to ISO, the company should do an audit every year. Last one was 3 years ago, but I'm certain that someone wrote down every year that they did it.
Don't be so confident that falsification can be spotted. It usually can't. Or require very time-consuming cross-checks that I never saw happen in my entire 20y career, such as comparing the number times an internal control was run vs. the quantity of consumables used in the process that were bought.
In case of Boeing, the other problem is... who's going to look before the plane crashes?
Paperwork should be regularly audited and discrepancies investigated. The other nice thing about fear is that it should be very specific - people should know exactly what they have to do to not feel it.
The consequences part that I mentioned is where it's at, if one wanted to design a functioning system.
If there's an incident and the investigation reveals an engineer signed off on something that was contrary to process, they lose their license and get to switch careers to something else.
If it turns out management pushed the engineer to do that, personal liability on management means they get to do some long jail time.
With those two enforcement points, you cut out nearly all the cheating.
Oh, of course it'll never happen. I'm just responding to the thread that if a government actually wanted to create an effective quality mechanism, it's possible.
I should add that the regulator will be to the letter. I was told a case where the company followed the test form a spec from standard x, but standard x was superseded twice. The latest spec and standard x, the testing was exactly the same but because the company had done the testing against x and not the latest they had to redo all the work. Regulator would not shift or give dispensation on passing it.
Anybody wanting a stable long term cash flows will align, and do their best to fix this. This is how banks were put in line after 2008, very effectively. No western bank knowingly circumvents new related regulations, punishments would be absolutely crushing and never worth the risk. Those people up there are not stupid, this is how calculus for criminals works.
EASA fills a similar role on a budget a 100 times smaller (in USD it's ~300m), paying for ~800 personnel.
The main difference is that EASA doesn't handle ATC, but it shows that the aspect of the FTC's duties we are talking about here really can't be that expensive.
If you'd 10x the budget of the FAA, it would have the same budget as the entire EU or 4x Airbus/Boeing's revenue. That's ridiculous.
10x is a bit ridiculous but I'm not sure it's that ridiculous for the FAA to have more expenditures than Boeing.
Sure, FAA (requested) budget is 22 Billion [1] while Boeing's revenue is 66 Billion [2]. However, United Airlines revenue is 57 Billion [3]. The FAA doesn't just manage Boeing so if we start adding up _every_ airline, airport, etc revenue I think that a budget of 66 Billion won't look as silly anymore. I mean they can't properly staff ATC currently so very trivially their current expenditures is too low.
[1]: https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/F...
I was trying to take the ATC component of the FAA out of the equation and illustrate why that is necessary. We should be looking specifically at the arm that certifies aircraft and try to figure out which order of magnitude we're dealing with. Luckily their European counterpart exists, which does not do ATC and thus allows us to get a better idea.
In fact if you look at the FAA's budget request breakdown you can see that the requested budget for their entire AVS services arm is less than 2B[1] (still much more expensive than EASA, but not too terrible).
While your comment is interesting, it's only tangential to what is being discussed.
[1] https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/F...
I'm struggling to reconcile how you can give a company & self-certification system that failed so egregiously another chance.
Why? Copying from another comment I made on this thread:
(Caution, my thoughts are a bit rambly and scattered. It's been a while since I studied this in detail for a class where I had deep divided into the max 8 crash and FAA's lapse, so the details are a bit foggy.)
The short answer is that unfortunately it's practically almost impossible to do this any other way, short of massively increasing funding for the FAA (which is presumably politically not going to be done.)
The long answer is, anyone with expertise ends up going to work at an aerospace company where they are properly compensated. You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc. (This isn't unique to just aviation btw but most industries where you need a high level of technical expertise.) And if you think it should be easily doable... here's a thought experiment. Say 20 people in boeing know about MCAS (pre crashes and their publicity). If even only 2 FAA employees need to be technically sound in their knowledge of such a niche system, that's about 10% of how many boeing employees know about it.
Now if you extrapolate that to all systems and all employees across multiple companies... you see why it's an issue for one agencies to have such deep knowledge about everything. (And this isn't even considering what happens when people quit etc.)
Because of this, the most obvious answer to "how does the FAA, without much engineers, decide what's safe or not", is to ask the experts and just have them certify stuff, well, not under oath, but as close to that as possible.