alt Hacker NewsThey had two diverse paths, but apparently did not have a (reliable?) process for ensuring the backup path was functional during fail-over. I imagine there will be some soul-searching over that.
Nothing I've ever seen or experienced with FAA indicates a lack of care; the parsimonious explanation is almost always that people who care a great deal are working within complex systems that don't always have a consistent or externally legible set of priorities. Or more intuitively, the failures we see are the "acceptable" ones versus the unacceptable ones (like planes falling out of the sky).
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The problem is with considering the second path a backup path. It is a common problem with things that are considered to be a backup. In contrast, both paths should ideally have been in regular use. As a general policy, for resiliency, one should always exercise all of one's routes/suppliers/vendors, even if some are suboptimal, not just the primary one.
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> Nothing I've ever seen or experienced with FAA indicates a lack of care
Hard to fathom someone still holding that view after the 737MAX disasters.
The NTSB has repeatedly and publicly criticized the FAA for failing to implement their recommendations, including as recently as last week (Amazon Prime crash resulting in 5 deaths). They've explicitly called out the FAA's failure to act as a contributing factor in crashes, multiple times.
Regulatory capture ruined the FAA.