Building Safe Airplanes

How the MAX is already changing the regulatory system

Making commercial aircraft safe to fly should be a boring job, and one that people never hear about outside the pages of magazines like this one. Safety regulation should be discussed in tedious terms: harmonised, multilateral, international, predictable. Trusted, consensus-based agreements are its watchword.

Beyond the tragedy of lives lost aboard 737 MAX aircraft, there are huge consequences to the trust built up in the system that certified it as safe. And that could lead to a sort of regulatory mishmash, often described as a “patchwork” system, where aircraft are certified to operate in some jurisdictions but not others, where they must be modified before being approved to fly in some markets, and where airlines, airframers, the rest of the industry — and passengers — lack certainty and confidence in how it all works.