> The Max was certified under the old rules.

There's no comfort in the fact that regulatory capture was working well even before these changes. One can also ask if the law was a factor in the inadequate response to the first crash.

> Overseas regulators (certainly the EASA) will never just rubber stamp the FAA again.

Until the US government starts a trade war over the issue. It will not be quite that blatant, of course: it will be positioned as an unfair trade practice. Ask Canada about Bombardier to find out how that goes.

I find an interesting parallel with the current discussion around American business being unduly influenced by China's massive buying power, where even though it's perfectly legal, businesses are so scared of being locked out of China's market that they refrain from any criticism of the government there.

That's a negative side, but a positive side could be feeling great pressure to adhere to the (higher) regulatory standards of other countries. Boeing's capture of the FAA thus becomes a moot point because better regulators will still need their own standards met.

I would just point out that China and the EU will, without question, move to a more robust regulatory régime. I agree with that, that's just going to happen. But also, the US will act to move past its "rubberstamp" regulatory framework.

Now, should China or the EU regard the new US regulatory framework as being any more effective than the last "rubberstamp" US framework? Absolutely not. But changes will happen within the US as well, and there is an opportunity there to make things better.

All that said, yeah, in this case, people can be forgiven for being skeptical of the US. So most of the improvement in quality will likely be driven by the regulatory proctology exams we'll probably see out of China and the EU. But, hey, as long as better quality comes from somewhere, that's better for the people of the world overall.

While there is (a very) slim chance that Boeing and Airbus will face the same scrutiny in Europe - although my bet will be European regulators being somewhat more welcoming and collaborative towards Airbus, do you really expect that the certification times and efforts of Comac and Boeing will be the same in China?

> At this point, not sure it matters

IMO , it still important that this issues are brought to light, the corruption is revealed and the law should be fixed.

We also need to learn from this , like for self-driving cars there is also a big pressure from companies to move fast so I expect that there this sector could also suffer same problems.

Yeah, that headline is atrocious. And quite a bit of the content of the article is about the 2018 law which is basically irrelevant to the flawed approval of the MAX.

So, after having a clear demonstration that the industry is clearly unable to be trusted to put public safety above deadlines in a more stringent regulatory environment, we shouldn't give pause to the fact we just let slip even more rein?

I mean, I get what you're saying, however, in programming there is a practice whereby on discovery of a bad implementation pattern, you start thinking of where else this pattern may have been used. That seems to be being demonstrated in this article.

To an inexperienced reader it is highly confusing. I myself had to take pause and look up the date of FAA approval of the MAX.

To be fair, the title is accurate as written and raises a point that is relevant in its own right, especially as the FAA's approval of Boeing's response to the first crash was given under the new law. Furthermore, the article explicitly states that MCAS was initially approved under the old law.

If one is going to speculate beyond what is explicitly stated in the title, part of that speculation might well include the thought that if the change occurred before MCAS was approved, the title would likely have said that instead.

Not to mention the NYT is paywalled, and I suspect some folks might jump to conclusions before jumping through the hoops to read the article... :-)