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>>tafda+(OP)
It's funny how if you are a major corporation with fat government contracts you can systematically destroy your engineering department, ostracize whistleblowers, and wind up killing hundreds of people and nobody gets punished and the FAA will even be on your side, like the Boeing thing.

but if you make a youtube stunt that hurts nobody you can get 20 years in prison and the FAA acts like you besmirched the stellar reputation of the aviation industry.

>>fatnec+Gt1
The problem is that we really want companies (especially, in the U.S., U.S. companies) to build planes. So we need a regulatory regime that appropriately governs their behavior but also does not result in such draconian penalties for negligence that they decide it would be safer to invest in some other business.

Not to say we've struck exactly the right balance, necessarily. But there's just no logic in making a direct comparison between a company that made an error in designing am aircraft and an individual who flew a plane into the ground on purpose.