To put it into some relatable context, a simple electrical switch that you might grab for a few bucks at your local Home Depot would cost at least several hundreds of dollars because of all the red tape that must be satisfied for safety reasons.
Safety isn't cheap.
> because of all the red tape that must be
to
because of all the rigoy testing and precise engineering that has to be
Nobody is saying you can't pour theoretically meaningful pork into a traffic light in the form of QA and whatnot and get an indestructible traffic light that operates for a century without being touched in return. People are questioning whether that's actually necessary for a system that's already the Nth layer of redundancy.
All those inspections, certifications, and other requirements exist for very good reasons. Reasons that more likely than not cost us blood and tears to realize their need.
Maybe it's worth having a worse system that actually is there.
When I was an intern I got to help change the blinking red light on top of a 50 story building. It’s a big deal that was scheduled weeks in advance and probably involved two dozen people, a special lightbulb and a bunch of coordination.
Even among the team working it plenty of “how many X does it take to change a light bulb” jokes were told.
But consider than a pilot depends on certain things being there when things go wrong. If the weather is bad and there’s issues with instruments, seeing that red light is the difference between life and death. There are potentially dozens or hundreds of people on a plane and if I recall correctly up to 4,000 people in the building.
When life is at risk, the standard for engineering must be higher.
If/when it happens the professionals who deal in this stuff will say something mundane like "this system prevented ten close calls before we actually had one slip through, that's pretty great". And they'll replace the $5 lightbulb and move the "check the bulbs" from the monthly maintenance checklist to the weekly checklist. And you'll complain much like you're complaining now.
