The FAA only cared about minimizing the chance of any accidents.
Neither was able to look at the science, come to a compromise, and then implement it in a joint way. It took the carriers, who had just paid $80b (from the article) to inject sanity into the approach via voluntary buffer zones.
Turns out, single purpose regulatory agencies aren't great at considering matters outside their area of focus...
It seems like this is a case of multi-agency regulatory capture (by industries with competing interests) resulting in behavior akin to a failed state. If the state can’t arbitrate conflicts over public goods, what good is it?
Did I say that? Or am I responding to a extremely bizarre comment about the US being a “failed state” when parties found a solution without even exhausting the most obvious answer (given the US is a lawsuit-happy nation)
If all the FAA cared about was minimizing the chance of accidents, then surely they would have fast-tracked the certification and rollout of better radar altimeters that can operate in the spectrum allotted to them?
This seems like a case of the FAA's "never change a running system" running into a world that is changing. A world that expects radio equipment to be better behaved than the stuff we built in the 80s.
By FAA accounting, no change is less risky than any change.
And given their track record of success and reality, I partially understand. The only way to avoid unknown unknowns is to maximally simplify a system, and that starts with not introducing components uncharacterized by decades of real world use.
In a world where nothing changes, or at least doesn't change without an impact assessment by the FAA, they are kind of right.
The problem is that aircraft inhabit the same world as the rest of us, so sometimes their environment does change from things outside FAA control. And at that point, delaying technology updates for nearly half a century becomes a major liability.
No flying guarantees no accidents. This creates incentives in the wrong direction.
See for example the safety achieved by modern technologies in modern light aircraft designs, and the lack of certification of most of these because of the expense of complying with FAA certification requirements. So the certified fleet has to use existing certified designs from the 60s which have not progressed as much in safety.
You have a point about the FAA's handling of potentially safety-enhancing new technology, but that is not the issue here. Its safety concerns were verified by events after the compromise was put into effect (and the absence of any accidents as a consequence is not a counter-argument.)
The root cause of this problem is, to an extent, a problem of agency silos. The FCC exercised its responsibility for controlling radio interference almost entirely by regulating what equipment can transmit, but radar altimeters are now giving false readings because they are overly sensitive to signals they receive outside of their allotted bands. While this may formally be part of the FCC's responsibility, it is clearly something the FAA could have been more concerned about.
Let's see, one party focus on safety (minimizing the chance of accidents) and the other focises on revenue. I know which of the parties has more legs to stand upon. And don't pull out the MAX disaster, that is the proverbial exception that proofs the rule.
You can call it focusing on revenue if you want, but the reason carriers are willing to pay so much for it is because it is so useful. The 280MHz of C-Band spectrum is close to 2TB/s of data throughput. That is a massive benefit to our society.
If we only cared about safety, zero planes would be in the air right now. But sometimes usefulness outweighs safety.
And the money-grubber argument could easily go both ways. The airlines bought radar altimeters that were out of spec. They could buy radar altimeters that are in spec and just as safe, but that would cost money. You could just as easily spin that as the FAA only caring about money.
The FAA isn't hetting money from manufacturers for certification taking longer. Altimeters out of spec are, if true, a no-go and finding for every continued airworthiness org out there.
Well the concept of efficiency should be represented, financial responsibility, technological innovation, consumer and general public requirements, and then alongside this working collaboratively with other agencies to create joined-up policy (which involves balance between the needs of both agencies).
The only way to achieve total aircraft safety is to have no aircraft. If the FAA literally cared about nothing other than safety they would have everything grounded, so clearly they do to some extent care about other things.
Plausibly, a well-designed government would be explicit about the tradeoffs between safety and convenience and cost and so forth. In practice, that might be politically catastrophic. What usually happens, I think, is something like this: the official line is "keep risk down to a negligible level", where "negligible" is usually not quantified, and cost/inconvenience is largely ignored until everyone agrees that the risk has been made negligible, but below that threshold everyone's free to minimize cost/inconvenience.
(This might actually end up being a pretty good strategy. Let's measure cost and convenience in dollars, because trading those off against one another isn't so problematic; then maybe a reasonable approximation to what we care about is that 1. each death is like burning $X where X is probably some number of millions, and 2. having any major accident in a given year is like burning $Y where Y is many billions, because if there's a major accident then the hit to public confidence means (a) big loss to the airline industry, (b) more people driving instead of flying, which means more deaths because flying is much safer, and wasting a lot of their time, and probably also more environmental damage. In that case, maybe the effect of #2 is actually not so very different from "big penalty if the risk goes above a negligible level". But it seems like we'd get better decisions overall by being more explicit about what we care about and how much.)
The approach I think you are proposing, safety above all, often leads to very low efficiency and in the end can lower total safety, for example encouraging shift to alternative modes of transport. Or by setting the certification bar so high that companies with new technologies, including those to improve safety, do not even bother to apply.
An approach of joint utility, taking into account time, money and risk usually works better.
Not equally (where did I say that?) but put frankly it depends how much risk.
Everything is a trade-off, and actually what we usually aim to do as society is to manage acceptable and balanced levels of risk rather than use safety as the single-lens to make decision. As an example, the design of cars would be very different if they were designed only with safety in mind, and if automakers pursued this goal ignoring factors such as speed, comfort and price point (or indeed, competitive pressures).
It's also worth noting that the "efficiency" in my post actually came from the stated goals of the FAA.
The FCC only cared about selling the spectrum.
The FAA only cared about minimizing the chance of any accidents.
Neither was able to look at the science, come to a compromise, and then implement it in a joint way. It took the carriers, who had just paid $80b (from the article) to inject sanity into the approach via voluntary buffer zones.
Turns out, single purpose regulatory agencies aren't great at considering matters outside their area of focus...