Nobody gets fired for saying no. This is how greatness fades away and a nation becomes uselessly sclerotic and irrelevant.
Five hundred and thirty seven people killed from the 737 max scandal, which showed the FAA was basically not providing any oversight of Boeing whatsoever, and even worse, was complicit in coverups: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/18/22189609/faa-boeing-737-...
Furthermore, the FAA was the last national agency in the world to ban the 737 Max from flying. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/business/boeing-737...
That lack of supervision included the FAA providing little or no oversight over Boeing using lithium ion batteries without sufficient testing, resulting in several fires on airliners.
Treating air traffic controllers so poorly - including underpaying them by nearly thirty percent, that they went on strike, and refusing to give them a shorter work week to compensate for the high stress nature of the job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...
and since then, we've had decades upon decades of overworked, overstressed, understaffed air traffic controllers, which results in problems ranging from crashes due to errors to falling asleep to substance abuse:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=FAA+air+traffic+controllers+sleepi...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=FAA+air+traffic+controllers+drunk
A controller in Las Vegas has a stroke and was speaking gibberish for half an hour before anyone in the control tower noticed, likely because she was working alone and unsupervised.
Am I forgetting anything?
"Model of professionalism in civil service" my ass. This debacle over fueling is just yet another way the FAA has pointlessly stood in the way of progress to protect vested industry interests. FAA regulations are rife with all sorts of absurd shit barring a private pilot from modernizing their planes in cost effective manner or enhancing them with greater avionics capabilities.
Yes, the words "most" and "pockets of sheer insanity." I am not so simple-minded as to view an entire agency as a single, atomic entity. I recognize what they do well and am one of the harshest critics of what they do poorly, especially when the results are death. This is something I hoped I had conveyed in my original post.
This is in fact an argument against FAA: you can risk your life in many other ways in many other contexts not regulated by FAA, so why not be allowed to risk your own life in a regulated field?
Think, for example, about racing home made cars on salt flats: perfectly legal, even though you could conceivably hit someone who just happens to stroll by. Why can’t I race my home made plane over salt flats?
Also, even if you follow FAA rules, you’re still risking other people lives. Pretty much every nontrivial activity is potentially lethal to bystanders, and flying is even more so. Despite that, flying is still allowed in general. You cannot argue “activity X that has some minor risk to you and nonzero risk to bystanders should be disallowed, because you must not expose bystanders to risk”, when you are already allowed to expose them to bigger risks in other ways in the context of the same regulated activity.
You do not want to engage my actual argument, which is why you are trying to reframe it in a context where it is absurd. Of course I’m not suggesting that people should be allowed to drive 100 mph on the wrong side of busy freeway, and the reason you need to suggest that I do is that you are unable to engage what I actually say.
You don't need to attack people or be paranoid about their motives; you could use a little trust and reason, maybe even a sense of humor. I didn't read the comment after that, but I can see italics and other signs of another angry, self-righteous outburst. I guess everyone else on the Internet does it, so why not? It's working so well for our society.
This has interesting knock on effects, for example if private company ATC fucks up and gives you bad information, you don't have much in terms of options for example to dispute charges that you deliberately violated a presidential no fly zone.
Why would ATC being public or private contractor for public agency change your legal situation here?
Yes! They completely failed to notice that 5G was a thing, and that thing was going to be deployed everywhere, including near airports. They had like a decade to plan for it and any potential impact it might have on planes.
Now they're panicking and trying to hold up a nationwide 5G rollout because they were asleep at the wheel.
FCC is the one that sold problematic spectrum before work was done (and yes, work was being done, and it's not trivial to deal with spectrum change like that)
Then there was the ridiculous ruling that it was illegal for people to receive pilot training in their own airplanes, contradicting decades of prior practice and rule interpretation. That had to be undone by Congress: https://www.flyingmag.com/flight-instruction-faa/
And recently there was a ruling that essentially made go-arounds (aborted landings) illegal (if the testimony here is true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpFDRoStcd4 ).
I had faith the FAA once. No more.
Why not link to the actual ruling instead of some random YouTube video when making such a far-fetched claim?
Where does this come from? Things are permitted and developed all the time. In fact, many perceive government as overly lenient to big business, leading to disasterous results (like the Boeing plane crashes).
Where are you seeing a overabundance of 'yes'?
The small government / empower big business lobby likes to use the rhetoric of repetition-until-it-seems-like-fact, but that doesn't make it true.
This is not always true. I'm a former patent examiner. At the US patent office, sometimes granting a patent (answering yes) is the safest response. If an examiner can't find a reason to reject the application in the time they are given, what choice do they have? Their decisions can't be arbitrary.
(Aside: I wonder what the effects would be of inventing and patenting environment-destroying technologies, then refusing to license them to delay their implementation. The patent system allows anyone to ban a technology, if they can convince the examiner they invented it.)
> (Aside: I wonder what the effects would be of inventing and patenting environment-destroying technologies, then refusing to license them to delay their implementation. The patent system allows anyone to ban a technology, if they can convince the examiner they invented it.)
I imagine polluting companies would ignore the patents ("efficient infringement") and/or try to invalidate the patents.
The operation of a monopoly was already possible before the patent via trade secrets (typical contemporary example, SpaceX), what the patent does is make it illegal to break the monopoly by re-inventing the technology.
If they are 50% efficient, or even 10% efficient, they won't be eliminated. They're still needed for certain basic operations in aviation.
However, if they do something with a 30% chance of a great outcome from aviation, and 1% chance of a negative scandal, that negative risk outweighs any positivity.
It's also how stability is maintained and a nation remains safe and trustworthy.
https://fee.org/articles/bureaucracy-kills-a-lesson-from-rom...
Is is telling that aviation’s “sustainable fuel” vision is the same Fischer-Tropsch chemistry that’s been abandoned for everything else because the capital cost of the machinery is too damn high.
Ground transportation has moved on to single-entity fuels that are synthesizable like 1-butanol and dimethyl ether. I can’t for the life of me see why the industry isn’t developing methane as an aviation fuel as it could even be the low cost solution in 2022 if Airbus had developed that instead of the thoroughly pizzled A380.
In fact, the only viable use of Methane in aviation fuels was by 2007 considered to be... feedstock for Fischer-Tropsch chemistry, which also can make carbon-neutral syntin that will require no complete rebuilds of planes and engines.