[isaiahg]

> The explicit safety target that FAA and other regulators have settled on is that catastrophic events should be “extremely improbable,” meaning one per billion flight-hours. The regulation of this kind of aviation is nothing short of maniacal.

Maniacal really? Is the author living in reality?

[mschuster91]

He is, airlines have been complaining about the paperwork involving anything that flies for decades - however given incidents like [1] with fake parts being spliced into legitimate supply chain, or how that paperwork enables accident investigation boards to quickly determine root causes often in a matter of weeks to months, the regulations do have merit.

On the other hand, you got a ton of Global South countries, particularly in Africa, with very lax enforcement of any kind of standards, and they don't end up with hundreds-of-pax-dead catastrophes every year, so either the regulations could be relaxed legitimately across the board or the lack of catastrophes is mostly because almost all planes flying out there are Western-built with considerable amounts of safety margins, redundancies and fail-safes built-in.

[1] https://fortune.com/2023/10/03/delta-fourth-major-us-airline...

[hef19898]

Some companies in a regulated industry want less regulation. Big surprise.

But no, less regulation is not what we need in aviation, cars, food or medcine. Those regulations have litteraly been written in blood.

And guess how many of those lax airlines are allowed to land in e.g. the EU. Not that many, and those airlines from those regions that are allowed in European airpsace are adhering to EASA requirements, and thus are the opposite of lax.

No matter how you design an aircraft, and safety margins there are lower than for e.g. cars, with bad and lacking maintennace it becomes a safety hazard rather quickly.

[ultrarunner]

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I think it's important to keep in mind that these companies often want more regulation— especially regulation that they're already compliant with. Of course EASA compliant airlines don't want to open things up to airlines that can operate more cheaply. Whether or not that's solely a consideration of safety is less clear.

Age 67 is another example where unions do not want more competition. I imagine a hypothetical relaxation of CPL regs would be similarly opposed by airlines and unions alike as they certainly wouldn't welcome the resultant competition. Desire for regulation can have many motivations.

[mschuster91]

> But no, less regulation is not what we need in aviation, cars, food or medcine. Those regulations have litteraly been written in blood.

For the record: I fully agree with you, I just wanted to provide some context.