https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance...
TDLR 10-20 years ago, the US started allowing maintenance of domestic planes in foreign countries, outside the reach of the FAA’s inspections
See also how FAA allowed Boeing to oversee its own certification for MAX.
Foreign Repair Stations date back to the 90s [1], the thing is they need to be supervised by an FAA Certified Mechanic. Inspection of these was already a hot issue in the early '00s... No one gave a fuck, it was all about saving costs for a very long time.
The linked 2007 report's second page (!) already leads with this:
> Since 2001, eight commercial air carriers have gone through bankruptcy and one has ceased operations. Fuel prices remain high, and this makes cost control a key factor in both the sustained profitability and overall survival of an airline.
IMHO, this is a perfect example why the government needs to regulate prices in safety-critical industries. The "race to the bottom" must be prevented - sorry, flying NYC-SFO for 70$, that's not sustainable.
[1] https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/Web_File_Foreign...
Are you saying higher prices would lead to better safety?
If so, I think it's optimistic to assume that would be the result, rather than just more profits.
I'm all for tighter regulations and enforcement on safety and maintenance, though.
Higher prices and regulations.
With no floor on pricing, there will always be enough greedy executives who are willing to cut corners to make money in a ruthlessly competitive environment, fully knowing that it is very hard to prosecute a C-level executive personally.
The other possible result will be that eventually the market "agrees upon" a minimum price floor while being in compliance to regulations - but that usually means that the company will be as bare-stripped of assets and reserves as possible, which means in turn that the slightest external shock can (and will) send not just one but multiple companies crashing down hard. We've seen this with Covid - an economy that has optimized itself for decades on running as lean as possible is very sensitive to all sorts of external interruptions. Of course, that's not directly relevant to safety... but indirectly it is, as the inevitable result of that is an oligo-, duo- or monopoly and then, we've seen with Boeing where that ends, incentives aligned too much to cut corners.
I think greed is what's causing cut corners.
You mention Boeing, and they were quite healthily profitable during the entire time they were cutting corners on the 737 MAX. Airbus wasn't an existential threat. It still isn't, in fact, even after all the fallout.
Ordinarily yes, but in this case there are reports that the plane underwent a "heavy maintenance check" from Sep 3 to Oct 18, which may have included engine removal and overhaul (source: pprune.org, from a poster who's not given to flights of fancy.)
The 737 Max crashes were also so frequently explained by online commenters as because of “outsourced software engineers” and so on.
But the FAA/NTSB always comes through with fact finding despite the immense political pressure to find these facile explanations. Organizationally, someone once designed these things well, and subsequently it has been preserved so well.
When I see so many American institutions turned to partisan causes through an escalation of “well, they’re doing it” it’s pretty wild that this org remains trustworthy. Wild.
> I'm all for tighter regulations and enforcement on safety and maintenance, though.
That's from my first comment in this thread. I'm not sure what part of my comments make you think you should ask me that question.
What I'm arguing is against the notion that having minimum prices would fix said greed.
The industry (edit: planes in particular) is also decades more mature, as is manufacturing in general.
However, it's impossible to argue that deregulation made flying more dangerous, as the GP believes, simply because flying didn't become more dangerous. Sure, maybe we'd be even safer in the air if price deregulation hadn't happened, but that requires an impressive amount of handwaving. Overall, the tradeoff seems to have worked out incredibly well for everyone. The only people who are really in a position to object would be climate researchers.
Either way, to say it's "likely relevant" is a huge leap. We have no idea what caused the crash - it could be a million things and likely some combintation of them.
Aviation is one of the most regulated industries to the point where I've heard multiple aircraft maintenance people who don't know each other make quips to the tune of "we only cut the stupid corners because cutting the smart ones is illegal".
I'm not saying it should be less regulated but considering that the aircraft was maintained recently I wouldn't be surprised if some dumb "well you didn't say we couldn't do it" thing that isn't technically disallowed but should be covered under some broader "don't be stupid" rule was ultimately a causative factor.
The problem is, it doesn't work out that way. We lost enough people to that madness - as soon as hundreds, if not thousands (see 9/11) of lives are at stake, IMHO the effort to ensure compliance with standards is so massive, the government could (and should...) do the damn job itself.
There are foreign planes entering US airspace every day, carrying thousands of passengers. They are also serviced by foreign technicians, outside the reach of the FAA's inspections, and they seem to be doing just fine.
"Foreign" in itself isn't bad, you just need to choose/require reputable partners. If you outsource your maintenance to the same crews that maintain jets for Polish LOT or Taiwanese China Airlines, you may save some money and yet get excellent service, as those airlines aren't known for having safety problems.
Kosovo or South Sudan would be a different story.
The history of how that came to be is worth a read and answers your question better than I could.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Transportation_Safety...
A lot depends on your overall marketing. The airline can make money on a "stupid tax", e.g. people who didn't check twice the max. allowed weight of their baggage and have to pay a 100 USD/EUR fee for that single extra pound. I have seen it more than once.
People being people, you can almost rely on this happening frequently enough.
You seem to be trying to defend "international", but reality is "international" has become "domestic" as the USA turns into something other than the USA.
This is nonsense. Commercial aviation is already ridiculously, insanely safe and has been for decades. Your proposed solution would not have done anything to prevent the one major accident in the past 15 years of commercial aviation in the US, which was caused by a military helicopter pilot violating an ATC restriction in complex airspace, not a maintenance issue.
What evidence do you have that "NYC-SFO for $70" is not sustainable? From March 2009 to December 2024 years in the US, the fatality rate in commercial aviation was 0.4 per passenger-light-year. That's nearly 15 years of operation with the foreign repair stations that you are accusing of putting profits before safety.
This is, like, the most ridiculous industry possible to demand more regulation of.
One thing that stood out to me was just how long ago that separation was achieved and subsequently ensured.
Firstly, fuck you.
Second, this shop consistently rated higher across all metrics, including those inside the US. Loss time injury rates measured in the millions of man hours.
Third, 80% of my job whilst there was to build software for QA and their rigourous on-going inspection reigeme that included yearly in person audits lasting weeks from FAA inspectors, EASA inspectors and every other country and airline this base overhauled.
Take your uninformed bs and hit the road. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about and insinuating that they're outside the reach of the FAA shows you know exactly 0 about the certification process that keeps millions of people safe on a daily basis.
And yet, we got hundreds of people dead because Boeing by all accounts clearly isn't regulated enough - and cut corners because airlines wanted to maintain their pilot type ratings.
This should not have happened, at all.
But I’ll bite in case it’s an honest question by an honest person; you’ve surely heard of the story based on the ship of Theseus, but what if the ship was replaced with not even ship replacement parts, but totally different things? Would and should you still call it a ship at all? Would it still serve the purpose and function of a ship of it was instead a pile of rocks rather than the components of a ship perfectly joined in a way that allows its characteristics of a ship to serve their purpose in general, even if the specific ship was replaced part by part?
If I could magically snap my fingers and replace all of India or all of Germany with Japanese people or maybe aboriginals of what is today called Australia; would it still make sense to call India, India or Germany, Germany? Why still call them India and Germany at that point since it’s just nonsensical to do so when no one there is Indian or German?
On a more specific level, what is the USA without the ethnicity and cultures that not just made it and everything we take for granted that came from it … all that democracy and freedom stuff… possible in the first place, but the people who built it on those foundations?
To me it seems like over of those PE leveraged buyouts that ends up hitting the whole company to siphon off the value and leave an empty just in its place; you know, like what has essentially been done to all of America for the last 50 or so years. Now people wonder why the whole collective west cannot even muster the industrial capacity to even supply the Ukraine, let alone ourselves.
Maybe it will be something, and it might even still be called the USA if you swap everything behind the branded facade out with something totally different like how Berkshire Hathaway still carries the name but has absolutely not a single connection to either of the original companies. But keeping the name does not make Berkshire Hathaway a textile manufacturing company. What is America when people have successfully replaced the people and neutralized and eradicated the Constitution that is a thorn in the eyes of extremely terrifying people?
It always baffles my mind a bit that such basic things have to be explained like what you are essentially asking, i.e.,” how can replacing something with something totally different mean it is not the same thing as it was before”. I don’t mean that as a personal insult, it’s just concerning and curious how fundamental lower order thinking is failing or maybe just being eroded or even just driven out. It feels like full fledged civilization cognitive devolution, like being asked why one should avoid doing things that will cause death; on the level of collapse of the most fundamental survival instincts. It’s quite curious from a historical perspective.
What is the USofA other than wave after wave of immigrants mixing together with Chinese railway workers, Spanish speaking holdovers from New Spain, and migrants from every corner of the earth?
That is a propaganda psyop that was the wedge that Americans were not in any way equipped to see or defend against because they thought they were untouchable in “fortress America” protected by seas and weak neighbors. For context, for the first 200 years of America’s existence until 1975, America was basically a purely Germanic European civilization and even nation, depending on your definition. For context; the Anglo Saxons, the Dutch, the Germans, i.e., the founders of America; are all Germanic people. Although they played a rather secondary role, even the French, i.e., the Franks (I don’t want to hear it, French people! Yes, you’re special and unique flowers.) are also a Germanic people, even though that gets a bit more complicated the more special you get.
There are literally not even any Africans that made it to the Americas on their own volition to this day. Not one. There are no founding stock Hindi speakers. There are not even Spanish founders of America since Germanic culture did not and clearly still does not mesh well with whatever we want to call the culture of the group called Hispanics in America; and I personally appreciate Spanish and Hispanic culture and countries on an individual level.
It was no Semitic philosophy that could have even produced the Constitution. It was neither Hindu or any other reincarnation based mindset that restrained government power through the Constitution … how would it when you believe you just reincarnate and this is not a one-shot? It cannot … thus, it, among all the other cultures, did not. It all, solely and only came out of European cultures; people who respected the Greeks and Romans for their accomplishments, and didn’t instead try to destroy them and erase and replace their culture and knowledge and history as is being done now all throughout the “west”.
What happens when you’ve strangled the single most effective and productive engine of civilization in human history, Europe? I sure don’t know exactly because it’s never been done in 3000+ years of civilization, but someone’s going to find out, even if it happens after I’ve gone and we haven’t just let narcissistic psychopaths snuff out life on this planet and possibly even in the whole universe.
2. Arguably, these crashes were due to the FAA's failure to apply existing regulations, not a lack of adequate regulation in the first place! I don't have any problem with better funding for the FAA to do their job effectively.