> Regulatory pressure is a market force and a useful one too.

That's assuming the regulations are competent. But if you let the market consolidate then the incumbent has enough money to buy off the government. Or it happens the other way around and the government is kind enough to set out regulations that only a megacorp can satisfy, thereby destroying the competition and awarding the last company standing the vaunted "too big to fail" get out of jail free card.

Which in turn gets you the 737 MAX sort of problems where the regulations both cause a problem (recertification is prohibitively expensive) and then fail to impede the incumbent's efforts to shirk it because you can't be damaging the business of your only domestic producer.

I agree that regulatory pressure is a market force (I wish more people understood this), but I disagree that capital intensive things that must be done right can only be done by big organizations - quite the opposite. If the regulatory environment is strong and effective, small organizations can thrive even in pharma and aviation. If an industry is comprised solely of huge organizations, then when one becomes corrupted (like Boeing has, see the 737 MAX debacle) it becomes impossible to terminate that organization. Organizations that are too big to fail are too big to be regulated.

There is an old saying in the engineering world: “Regulations are written in blood.

> I can endure buggy software but I don’t want to deal with buggy planes

A plane built for resilience against defective engine components would be very different from the airliners we fly today. I would assume more engines for redundancy, better protection against catastrophic failure, different designs to allow engines to function even if parts flew out, and so on. It’s an interesting design exercise to build from radically different expectations from the fundamental parts.

Alternatively, a far less radical redesign would be turbines running at a much more forgiving regime feeding electric motors.