I wonder what the FAA does organizationally that lets it function properly to find cause. It must be highly tempting to blame things on the foreigners and stuff like that. The Air India crash had a lot of that going on.

The 737 Max crashes were also so frequently explained by online commenters as because of “outsourced software engineers” and so on.

But the FAA/NTSB always comes through with fact finding despite the immense political pressure to find these facile explanations. Organizationally, someone once designed these things well, and subsequently it has been preserved so well.

When I see so many American institutions turned to partisan causes through an escalation of “well, they’re doing it” it’s pretty wild that this org remains trustworthy. Wild.

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mh- 15 hours ago | parent [-]

The NTSB is completely independent from the FAA, by design.

The history of how that came to be is worth a read and answers your question better than I could.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Transportation_Safety...

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yard2010 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can't play with the NTSB. Just wait a few months and see, they will literally say the exact reason it happened and who's the one to blame in their report. These guys are the best at what they do. This is one of the government bodies other countries would dream to have.

	▲	SAI_Peregrinus 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The NTSB never assigns blame to people in their reports. They report what happened, and who did what, but their reports are not intended for use in a court and their advisories are always ways to fix procedures rather than blaming individuals.

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renewiltord 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Huh, wow, that actually did answer the question. Short version: the FAA did have this failing; the NTSB was created independently specifically to avoid that flaw. For the rest, he’s right, better to read it.

	▲	mh- 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, wasn't meant to be a lazy comment on my part, but I started summarizing it a few times and found myself quoting more of the article than made sense. One thing that stood out to me was just how long ago that separation was achieved and subsequently ensured.