With the recent crash of the Nepalese airplane, I saw a lot of comments on :reddit-logo: talking about how Nepal has poor safety standards, bad piloting certifications, and how they buy second to third hand planes that they don’t maintain.
I’m sure that has nothing to do with capitalism.
But I also saw comments about how Euro and American standards are much, much better. I’m sure that’s true to some extent, given how many airplanes fly over these regions with so few incidents. But… I don’t really see why.
Wouldn’t the center of capitalism be more aggressive with its cost-cutting measures and safety shortcuts? It would improve their profit margins and given the Tendency, they have to take every chance they get, right?
Are we just waiting for a huge, huge sudden spike in airplane crashes as these measures start catching up?
Or is government regulation (and enforcement) still somehow strong in this industry?
This isn't to say that there aren't tons of cost cutting measures going on that cause issue, but the cost cutting is put into the cabin, not the actual plane.
I worked at a small regional airport and the small/mid sized jetliners that flew in had issues all the time, but the worst case scenario was electrical fire in the cabin because of a poorly maintained passenger area. The hub and spoke model helps a lot too. The smaller planes only spend half their time at airports unequipped to repair them, and the large planes are never at an airport unequipped to repair them.
As for profits, one of the big reasons that the profit motive doesn't drive airlines to run their planes into the ground is that a broken plane makes no money, and can't be resold (on top of the reputation thing, people seeing your company logo looming over 300+ corpses on the news for weeks can really fuck up the bottom line).
They've basically determined that you can make people insanely uncomfortable and still get their money. You can fuck them over with fees and fines and non-refundable tickets, you can accidentally mess up the cabin conditions and cause small electrical fires and people will still come fly with you. The only thing that makes them stop is if they think your plane is dangerous.