Having worked in the financial industry for close to two decades, and with most of my friends in the same industry, it is remarkable to what lengths regulators went after the 2008 banking crisis.
Banks are vital middlemen between many parties and as such, were already heavily regulated back then, but after the massive tax-payer funded bailouts, regulation went into overdrive.
For example, Banks are expected to survive short- to mid-term dire periods. However, the 2008 crisis showed that most banks were not in that position. So the regulators went into overdrive and regulated most of the weak spots they had identified, and (IMO) most importantly, really stepped up stress tests. Banks have to demonstrate that they can survive interest rate shocks, market crashes, political crises, etc. for a certain amount of time.
And these things get audited extensively. A friend of mine works at a bank under direct ECB oversight, and the sheer amount of data, models, simulations, etc. they need to produce is just staggering.
Perhaps it is time to apply some of these methods to other industries that might only survive with a taxpayer bailout. For example, a global pandemic as we are experiencing right now, is not exactly something that was unimaginable before.
Airlines could be expected to maintain contingency plans for such scenarios, and required to maintain appropriate financial buffers, with stock buybacks, dividends etc. forbidden as long as those buffers are below the levels required by those scenarios.