this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
137 points (96.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
643 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
While I'm broadly in agreement with you (and am certainly not in favour of banning flying), I think recent events have shown us pretty clearly: they are not nearly as well-regulated as the industry likes to claim, especially with the large commercial aeroplanes.
Still better regulated than cars and driving.
I think the problem is that some of the corporations have decided that it's acceptable to increase the margins of error in the name of profit.
If they make more money than they lose due to lawsuits and lost customers, it's a win in the eyes of capitalism!
The FAA and industry response to Boeing's neglegence has been swift and complete. I don't think these recent events detracts from what I said.
Boeing has been having issues going back a lot further, since at least the 787 Dreamliner. It's just gotten a lot worse with the 737 Max.
The problem is that the FAA allows them to use "Designated Inspectors" to ensure their compliance, which are Boeing employees, not independent FAA staff. And the FAA is still allowing them to fly despite there still being serious known flaws (being unable to run the anti-ice system for more than 5 minutes without potentially damaging the engine).
It's also probably why their only real competitor, not being based in business-friendly safety-regulation-hating America, hasn't had similar problems.
In a properly regulated market, the FAA never would have allowed 737 Maxes to be certified for use, or it at least would have grounded them once issues became clear. Instead, they treat Boeing as "too big to fail" and don't want to upset the travel market in the way that grounding large numbers of planes because of a safety concern.