And anyway, to your original points, air travel got a lot safer in the last 40 years because of government intervention. Same with cars, perhaps even more dramatically. That’s why the hubbub now. The government intervention was decreased and the safety seems to have gone down. (This is true of both the mechanical and operational aspects, see all the articles about increasing runway incursions and near collisions.)

Correlation != causation, but one doesn’t have to be ignorant of statistics to suspect the system failure is at least in part due to letting corporations self-certify.

We don’t want the regulators to wait until there’s another crash to do something about it.