There’s a lot to unpack in your claim, and this really hinges on your definition of “effective”.
What do you consider to be effective, and how would you differentiate it from theater?
Right up front, it seems necessary to account for the relative safety of flying if that safety has nothing to do with FAA policies.
It also seems that any safety policy that is effective enough will eventually appear indistinguishable from theater as people become more and more disconnected from the possibility of disaster.
2) the fact the 737 Max disasters happened outside the US was a matter of chance not exemplary policies by the FAA. FAA policies did not prevent the deployment and roll out of this dangerous aircraft in the United States and did not lead to grounding of the aircraft until multiple events occurred.
3) I'm mostly talking about software here, and I believe a big part of this issue is shoe-horning software into the policies and procedures specifically designed for aviation. there are so many little pointless (in most contexts) requirements that cause the engineers working on these systems to lose the forest through the trees. the FAA creates its own complexity which prevents thinking holistically about our systems in a meaningful or effective manner.
in many ways this is a force of entropy. the more lines of code you have to support thousands of requirements and the more revisions you make to those lines of code without a top to bottom refactor the more likely you are to have insidious bugs that pop out like this incident.
Another way to think about it is that safety is good for profits, at least in so far as consumers care about it.
And I think consumers do care quite a bit.
Of course there are arguments to be made for regulation, but I think your statement is overly emphatic.
In theory, if you ask explicitly, of course they do. In practice, they choose the cheapest ticket and maybe avoid airlines that have had a high profile incident recently. They don't have the time or means to actually evaluate an airline's safety culture.
Meanwhile, executive decisions are driven by quarterly earnings reports, and you can cut a lot of corners for quite a number of quarters before your luck runs out and 200 people die.
My statement is, if anything, not emphatic enough.
That doesn't make the statement any less ridiculous.
What was the ultimate reason for the 737 MAX debacle? That airlines want to save money on type rating training.
Look at accident reports, and half the time the airline's safety culture (or lack thereof) is at least a contributing cause.
The FAA may be in many ways dysfunctional, but so are the airlines, and it's sure as hell not them who are pushing for better safety standards, it's the FAA and (especially) the NTSB.
On the other hand, if Boeing actually cared about safety instead of profits they wouldn't have done their utmost to hide the fact that they were avoiding the FAA's safety regulations to improve profits.
Demonstrably flu vaccines do not effectively avert risk. Demonstrably auto safety standards do not avert risk.
But they do. And they've been so incredibly effective that we have collectively forgotten what risk used to feel like, so we're ready to say we don't need these standards/organizations or that they're not working. Obviously this is not to say they are perfect or free from criticism. But it's not just theatre.
