Good regulation is how air travel became the safest method of travel in the past few decades without impeding on innovation or affordability. Bad regulation is when that same regulatory body, the FAA, delegates most of the oversight to the very same companies they should be overseeing.
IMO, we're in an age where regulation is the only tool left for a civilized society to leash their multi-billion corporations to actually help benefit society and not only their shareholders. I've been beating around the bush, but Boeing has already rebounded (tremendously) after the tragic incidents in the past few years.
Aviation is still one of the most heavily regulated areas in the country, though, and its excellent safety record is due to the practices adopted within that regulatory environment.
If the FAA were to disappear tomorrow, I guarantee with absolute, utter certainty, that aviation's safety performance would drop--in some cases over time, in some cases, overnight. I would bet any amount of money on that.
That is not obvious, and evidence in the airline industry shows that deregulation did not lead to the catastrophe you claim it will, but will make things better.
Regional and commercial jets cost tens and hundreds of millions of USD. The greediest caricature capitalist will want to protect this investment. Their insurers will demand certain terms to accept the risk of having to replace such a costly asset. Our greedy capitalist villain wants repeat business. Dead customers don’t pay again. Lawsuits are costly. Their friends and family will be reluctant to book fares with airlines they perceive as being unsafe. “Qantas never crashed.”
This just isn't true even in the already regulated environment.
It is "irrational" for a "greedy" slaveowner to kill their slave, a significant monetary investment sometimes, and yet it happened all the time, because capital owners are not rational.
A significant fraction of aviation fatalities can be traced directly back to those "greedy capitalist villains" actually completely cutting corners to save a penny and losing million dollar aircraft.
Business owners are not rational actors, they are gamblers.
None of this is true. A company left to their own devices will optimize for maximum profit at the cost of literally everything else. Every cost of their business that's possible to externalize will be externalized. Every corner will be cut in the name of marginally better profits.
For example, you say lawsuits are costly. To a company, that's meaningless. The only question is, is the cost of a lawsuit greater than the money saved cutting corners? If not, it's better to kill people and deal with the lawsuits: [1].
Moreover, companies are still run by people, and people have biases. Most notable of which is the short-term thinking bias that results in companies irrationally optimizing for short-term gains, compromising long-term ones. And what fits perfectly into that trap? Yep, safety. Do you know how much money you could save by delaying maintenance? Lots, lots of money to be had right now vs a nebulous concept of potentially higher chance of an accident at some uncertain point in the future. The monkey with its primitive brain chooses the immediate reward every time.
> A company left to their own devices will optimize for maximum profit at the cost of literally everything else.
You probably meant public companies because otherwise this sentence and rest of your comment do not reflect reality.
According to [0] (2019), 90% of (6.1m) businesses have < 10 employees. Lawsuits are a very big deal to these enterprises. They are not out to kill people for marginal profits.
I will take the other side of the bet. I offer you 1 to 10000 odds that, if the FAA disappears or otherwise becomes defunct, that the airline safer would be broadly agreed to be marginally safer 100 years afterwards.
I know where you are going with this. The FAA is indeed a burden when it comes to bringing new technology to market, including safety-critical technology. The cost of new tech and safety improvements would indeed go down without regulation, but on the balance, would all the other deep cost-cutting measures that airlines, manufacturers, airports, ATC would invoke actually result in increased safety overall? I'm not going to live 100 years so we'll never know, but I'm absolutely confident that it won't given how every other business in every other under-regulated industry sacrifices everything for the sake of profits.
I'm actually just taking the very outside view on this. I cannot think of any industry which has both existed for 100 years and would not be called safer today than it was 100 years ago. The closest I get are industries which stopped existing entirely because new industries supplanted them, but even there the argument is suspect. This seems to be a general trend regardless of the amount of regulation applied to the industry.
I think you might be unaware of the various regulations that are driving all of these other non-aviation industries towards better safety. Not only that, but liability and insurance claims also drive safety measures, which are also enabled by workman's comp and other regulations). I'm having trouble imagining a single company policy around safety (either for workers or customers) that is not ultimately driven by government involvement or the legal system.
I never claimed anything about company safety policies. Let's keep separate the concept of an industry becoming safer from whatever policies those companies officially adopt after rounds of writing and rewriting.
To wit, three prominent examples of industries frontrunning safety advances well in advance of any regulation around them. One: In the late 19th century, early electrification was burning cities down. Private insurance companies banded together to form the Underwriter's Laboratory to test products, refusing to insure buildings that didn't use UL-listed devices. Manufacturers voluntarily submitted to rigorous safety testing not because the police would arrest them, but because it got them access to insurance at a considerably lower cost.
Two: In 1959, Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin invented the three-point seatbelt. Volvo gave the patent away voluntarily to all competitors, partly to establish a brand identity of safety and innovation, and partly because they genuinely recognized that seatbelts saved lives. If your claims were right, Volvo would have either kept the patent to monopolize safety or, worse, buried it to save manufacturing costs. Instead, the market rewarded them for being the "safe car," and other manufacturers had to follow suit to compete, decades before seatbelt laws became universal.
Three: There currently exists almost no federal law governing recreational scuba diving in the United States. Yet, the industry is obsessed with safety. Shops by and large will not fill your tank without a C-card. The PADI and the NAUI update their standards constantly. If tourists started drowning en masse, in a sport virtually custom designed to do so, the industry would vanish. They self-regulate to preserve their market cap.
With all that, let's return to the claim you are endorsing. You say you are "absolutely confident", >99.99%, that the FAA's dissolution would lead an entire industry to be less safe a century from now. This seems like, at minimum, a lack of imagination regarding how markets solve coordination problems. You are assuming that in the absence of the FAA, a vacuum would remain. History suggests the opposite. Indeed, it seems entirely possible that without a shield of regulatory compliance to hide behind in court, liability pressures might actually make airlines more risk-averse, not less.
> Bad regulation is when that same regulatory body, the FAA, delegates most of the oversight to the very same companies they should be overseeing.
I wrote about this in the past, but the TLDR is that it’s anywhere between extremely tough to impossible to do it. The TLDR is that modern tech systems are so many and so advanced that only engineers of the company can truly understand it.
Ah yes, the best thing for society is surely to take the power from private people and businesses and to centralize it in government bureaucracy. Then only a small handful of people get to decide how we live! Along with the threat of imprisonment or violence if we don’t comply! Such a great idea.
IMO, we're in an age where regulation is the only tool left for a civilized society to leash their multi-billion corporations to actually help benefit society and not only their shareholders. I've been beating around the bush, but Boeing has already rebounded (tremendously) after the tragic incidents in the past few years.