On May 8, a Boeing 737 caught fire in Senegal, causing ten people to be hospitalised. This was just the latest in a long line of accidents and mishaps involving Boeing aircraft. From door plugs blowing off mid-flight, to wheels falling off on the runway, the company has been having a rather turbulent year.

In an ideal world, a company with such a track record would quickly go bankrupt. In the real one, sadly, Boeing is one of only two companies (the other being Airbus, which has similar problems) that manufacture commercial aircraft. Lina Khan, the chairwoman of the FTC, has even called Boeing “too big to fail”.

To make flying safer, we must first understand how things got so bad in the first place. It’s a tale of cronyism, regulatory capture, and government incompetence.

Boeing has long enjoyed a close relationship with the government. The company first started mass producing planes for the US Navy during World War I. Over the years, it kept supplying planes to the government and derives around half its revenue from government contracts to this day.

It also receives tax breaks, grants and infrastructure subsidies from state and local governments all over the US. The federal government also provides the company with massive subsidies and artificially cheap loans through the Export-Import Bank in order to help it export planes at a lower price. The bank is also derisively called the “Bank of Boeing”, since the company is the largest recipient of its aid. Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University points out that much of the bank’s Covid response was designed specifically for Boeing.

The amount of influence Boeing has on the government cannot be overstated. It spends millions each year to lobby lawmakers to pass laws for its benefit, and also contributes to their election campaigns. Even presidents do their bit in the service of Boeing, brokering deals on the company’s behalf. When it sold 200 aircraft to Air India last year, it was Joe Biden who announced the deal, not the CEO. Trump and Obama before him similarly brokered lucrative deals for Boeing.

It is not at all surprising, therefore, that Boeing has essentially captured the government’s entire regulatory apparatus. Writing in the Claremont Journal of Law and Public Policy, Leo Kalb Bourke shows how the Federal Aviation Administration gradually ceded its functions and authority to Boeing over the years, to the point where Boeing’s own employees are essentially certifying their own planes.

The idea was that planes are extremely complex, and this would, in theory, free FAA officials to inspect the most critical components while Boeing took care of everything else. In practice, Boeing had complete discretion over everything, and chose not to share key details with agency officials. The New York Times reports how this caused two fatal 737-MAX crashes that ended up killing 346 people.

When the fallout from the crashes forced legislators to pass new safety regulations, Boeing simply lobbied (read bribed) them and got an exemption, rendering the law useless.

Because Boeing basically controls the agencies that are supposed to regulate it, it and its suppliers have been getting away with extremely dangerous practices until recently. For instance, one of its suppliers was recently caught using dish soap as a lubricant for door seals.

In another case, an engineer at Boeing revealed how the company skipped crucial steps in the manufacturing process and pressured engineers to approve work they had not inspected. Last month, the Seattle Times reported how Boeing retaliated against engineers who reported lapses to the FAA. It gave those engineers negative performance reviews, which would hurt their chances of receiving pay raises and promotions.

Since the government is unable and unwilling to regulate Boeing effectively, we need a better alternative. I suggest that making all commercial planes open source would greatly improve their safety.

In his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond states that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. While he was writing about software, the logic holds here as well. If an aircraft’s designs are publicly available for all to see, any flaws will be found and fixed quickly.

A lot of people would have an incentive to go over these designs. There would be engineering students and their professors who would go over them in class. Insurance companies would hire their own engineers to determine how safe each model is so they can charge airlines higher premiums if they use more dangerous models. Airlines themselves will be able to more easily inspect planes and decide which ones to buy.

Then there are potential competitors that would spring up around the world to quickly fix any design flaws they find without having to bear the cost of designing the entire plane from scratch, leading to increased competition in terms of not just price, but safety as well.

Policymakers can help by removing the patent protections Boeing enjoys, and making it legal to reverse engineer their hardware and software. They can pressure the company to open source its designs by withholding government contracts until it does, and force it to do the same to its subcontractors as well. They must also eliminate tariffs to encourage foreign competition.

The government has failed spectacularly when it comes to keeping our planes safe. We need a much more comprehensive regulatory environment in which all stakeholders can bring their knowledge to bear and help make air travel safer. The freedom of open source will give that to us.