[masklinn]

Capitalism is a tool, not a force of nature*.

It can be channeled, directed and mitigated. That is what regulations and regulatory agencies do. Although of course you need to watch the watchers so they don't get captured.

* and even if it were, we channel, direct, and mitigate forces of nature all the time, if not always to great success, or without consequences

[bumby]

>of course you need to watch the watchers

I don't cut Boeing much slack, but some of this also falls on the FAA for delegating certain oversight activities to the manufacturer. I assume they do it for manpower reasons (ie there just aren't enough FAA employees to do the job sufficiently).

[masklinn]

I don't think there's any need to cut Boeing any flack to point out that the regulators did fail to do due diligence.

It is understandable that regulators would take a lighter hand to a company which has shown good ethics — which was historically the case of Boeing (more of an issue if that is because of not being able to handle the load), it's a problem if they go completely hands off.

I don't think the FAA is the sole culprit here either, we've not heard much of non-american regulators. While it makes sense that the FAA would be the primary regulator for Boeing, that regulators would cooperate internationally, and that non-primary regulators would have to be careful e.g. around the risk of being called out for trade restrictions, I still feel non-US regulators should have been a lot more involved with and suspicious of Boeing following the MCAS mess.

[bumby]

One of the looming risks is that other nations lose faith in the FAA to certify their aircraft. Particularly smaller nations, which, in effect, inherit the FAA certification as safe instead of levying their own.

[dclowd9901]

I’ll take your point a step further:

If you ask a company, any company, what the most important aspect of their product is, they’ll proudly crow “the quality of it.”

And yet, we still, for some reason, have to deploy the FAA to make sure profits didn’t take a front seat to not killing hundreds of people.

The FAA shouldn’t need to exist. It only does because private industry _never_ holds up its end of the bargain. It’s a race to the bottom. Unfortunately it’s not just consumer products that eventually get enshittified, it’s also big things that can kill us (737 Max 8s and Tesla autopilots apparently).

[p_l]

Both major cases of regulatory lack of oversight in USA involved presidential mandate to "deregulate" and "free" the airliner market (DC-8 cargo door failure history, and 737-MAX)