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US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

on.ft.com

11–20 of 367 posts

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#11
post #4

What’s there to consider even - political connections?

The problem is that the FAA doesn't have the expertise. The people with the expertise all work for aircraft manufacturers. And odds are the FAA will never pay anyone enough to leave the manufacturers to do the job.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#12
post #6

What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.

Famously, in the UK, Railtrack outsourced basically its whole operation. Including inspections, often to the same firms doing the work. This culminated in the Potters Bar crash. I worked with someone who survived it. He was, by his own estimation "not quite right" afterwards.

People don't often make the connection, but at that point the government of the day started pressuring Railtrack to fix the rails. Railtrack's countergambit was to demand money from the government, saying they couldn't afford to do it. This did not have the effect they had hoped for and ended up with Tony Blair, a man who had made a name for himself by changing the Labour party constitution so they no longer were about nationalising industries, having to nationalise a section of the railway industry. And to this date, no-one, even a conservative government in power for the last 14 years, has suggested privatising it again.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#13
post #6

What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.

TV channels have self-regulation as well - admittedly it doesn't directly kill people. There's also police departments, I suppose.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#14
post #6

What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.

The vast majority of industries are practically self-inspected, even when inspectors exist.

For example, take construction engineering; the government doesn't fully inspect every single submitted drawing, they may spot check here and there and make sure the paperwork is filled out, but the final duty rests with the engineer of record.

Same with building inspections, they're no where near detailed and long enough to catch everything, it's mainly a spot check to verify that it's not horribly incorrect.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#15
post #4

What’s there to consider even - political connections?

Does the faa have enough qualified staff and budget to review boeings planes? Does anyone other than Boeing have them, since noone else does it? Legitimate question. Would you poach a bunch of engineers from the airlines/military?

You build it up over time by hiring direct from colleges (or even trade schools).

It has to be a complete plan, not just a slap-dash "we can hire some people and the problem is solved".

To do it best you do NOT hire from the industry, and if necessary you hire from unrelated industries (perhaps, for example, oil rig/pipeline inspectors).

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#16
post #6

What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.

A lot of industries self-inspect with regulatory oversight. For example, the SpaceX Starship mishap investigation that required 63 corrective actions from SpaceX before they were allowed to fly Starship again was done by SpaceX with FAA oversight. It seems that the oversight was effective; I highly doubt that SpaceX would have imposed 63 corrective actions on itself without effective oversight.

It's hard to see how it could be any different. SpaceX engineers are the only ones with enough knowledge of Starship to do an effective investigation.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#17
post #6

What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.

Stockbroking, cinema, accountancy, law, life insurance, financial planning, nuclear power, real estate, medicine, advertising, media...[0][1]

Self-regulation (especially at the industry level rather than delegating to individual companies) doesn't seem completely broken. Actually it can work quite well. You keep some oversight, and reserve the right for the state regulator to step in if the SRO goes bad. The people who run the SRO have an interest in perpetuating their organization, so they if anything have an incentive to be stricter than the government would. If things do go wrong, the government demands direct oversight. That's what's happening here.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-regulatory_organization

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sro.asp

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#19

Finally, after a couple of plane crashes, fantastic investigative journalism, and a door blowing off mid flight (thankfully that was caught on video and shared). Too little, too late. We should regulate the regulators, bc I don't trust them either.

> We should regulate the regulators, bc I don't trust them either.

We should have oversight, and we do, but it's hard to pick a worse example of bad regulation (or a better example of good regulation) than the FAA. Air travel safety is extraordinary.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#20
post #4

What’s there to consider even - political connections?

Does the faa have enough qualified staff and budget to review boeings planes? Does anyone other than Boeing have them, since noone else does it? Legitimate question. Would you poach a bunch of engineers from the airlines/military?

As a practical matter, the FAA might designate someone outside of Boeing to do the inspections (like maybe people from Lockheed or Grumman, who are not directly competing in the commercial airliner space).

When you take a checkride at the end of training to earn your pilot certificate, it's not an FAA employee riding with you... it's a "DPE" or Designated Pilot Examiner, who is a private individual designated by the FAA to conduct check rides (and who often charges you a fee to administer the test).

Occasionally an FAA employee will ride along with the student pilot and DPE to evaluate how the DPE is evaluating prospective pilots.

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