Ossified Rules, Hidden Risk: When Safety Stops Progress
Stability and safety do not always coincide. Mature regulatory systems often optimize for defensibility—career safety for the individual regulator—rather than for minimizing total harm to the public.
Written By: Bryan Theunissen
Regulation is often justified as a safeguard—protecting the public, ensuring quality, and maintaining trust in complex systems. In the early stages of any industry, oversight plays a vital role, channeling innovation toward safe and effective outcomes. Yet as regulatory regimes mature, a paradox emerges: the very rules meant to ensure safety can calcify into rigid constraints that hinder innovation, perpetuate inefficiency, and ultimately increase systemic risk. Across industries, well-meaning regulations can, paradoxically, create risk by locking in outdated solutions while blocking demonstrably superior alternatives.
The Stasis Problem
Across sectors, the pattern repeats. In medicine, regulations that once encouraged innovation now preserve monopolies on decades-old technologies, inflating costs and delaying access to life-changing procedures. In energy, 1950s-era light-water reactor designs remain the default, while genuinely novel—and often passively safer—concepts face open-ended, prohibitively expensive reviews. In automotive safety, crash-test standards written for 1960s steel unibodies and hydraulic brakes make radical but demonstrably safer designs—steer-by-wire, composite monocoques, or vehicles without a steering wheel at all—difficult or impossible to certify. Even emerging domains such as urban airspace and drones are bound to rules drafted for crewed aircraft with fifty times the kinetic energy.
The paradox is simple: resources and attention are consumed not by progress, but by compliance with rules written for a previous era. This is a modern version of the broken-window fallacy: by focusing on “preserving the status quo,” regulators divert energy from creating genuinely safer, more efficient, and more effective alternatives. Risk accumulates not in the technology itself, but in the systemic inertia that prevents improvement.
Illustration: Aviation Accreditation
Aviation provides a particularly vivid example. Certification frameworks at the FAA and EASA were designed to ensure engines, airframes, and avionics met prescriptive standards reflecting the materials, manufacturing techniques, and testing methods of the 1950s through 1970s. Those rules were appropriate for the era.
Engineering has since leapt forward. Modern engines could incorporate ceramic-matrix composites, additive manufacturing, AI-driven predictive maintenance, and electric or hybrid propulsion systems with fewer moving parts and lower failure rates. Yet certification still demands that new designs prove “equivalence” to legacy architectures. The GE9X for the Boeing 777X, for instance, required roughly twice as long to certify as the original CF6 did in the 1970s—despite vastly better simulation tools and decades of accumulated safety knowledge. Compliance costs balloon, timelines stretch for years or decades, and many promising designs never reach the market.
The result is deeply paradoxical: rules intended to protect the flying public end up privileging outdated technology, slowing the adoption of inherently safer alternatives, inflating operating costs, and concentrating market power among legacy manufacturers. Airlines and private operators are effectively forced to rely on “museum-piece” engines because regulatory inertia makes modernization prohibitively expensive.
Positive Counter-Examples: When Reform Works
The pattern is not inevitable. In 2017, the FAA rewrote Part 23 for small aircraft, shifting from prescriptive design mandates to performance-based standards. The result was immediate: a surge of electric and hybrid propulsion projects, simplified avionics, and new airframe materials that would have been impossible under the old rules. Certification times dropped, costs fell, and safety increased because innovators could focus on outcomes rather than checking 1960s boxes.
EASA’s 2021 SC-VTOL rules for air taxis offer another rare success. Rather than forcing electric vertical-takeoff vehicles into crewed-aircraft templates, regulators defined the outcomes the system must achieve—noise below 65 dB, survivability after loss of thrust, detect-and-avoid performance—and let industry propose solutions. The framework is technology-agnostic and risk-proportional, demonstrating that rigorous oversight and rapid innovation can coexist when rules focus on goals instead of legacy hardware.
The Broader Principle
Stability and safety do not always coincide. Mature regulatory systems often optimize for defensibility—career safety for the individual regulator—rather than for minimizing total harm to the public. They prioritize compliance over progress, certainty over actual risk reduction, and exhaustive legacy-style testing over probabilistic evidence showing that a new design is far safer.
This creates a structural bias against innovation, sometimes in the very domains where evolution could produce the greatest safety gains. True safety, efficiency, and societal benefit emerge from continuous improvement, not from freezing systems in amber. Performance-based, adaptable frameworks allow industries to adopt safer materials, smarter technologies, and more resilient processes—reducing risk in ways prescriptive rules never could.
Conclusion
Across aviation, medicine, energy, automotive, and beyond, the lesson is clear: ossified regulation can paradoxically harm the public it is meant to protect. When rules preserve historical designs at the expense of proven advances, systemic risk grows. The rare successes—FAA Part 23, SC-VTOL—show that reform is possible when regulators focus on outcomes rather than templates.
In a world of accelerating technological change, true safety is not preserved by stagnation. It emerges from innovation, adaptation, and the courage to let better solutions replace the relics of the past. Policymakers, regulators, and industry leaders must embrace frameworks that prioritize outcomes over adherence to legacy templates to ensure that protection evolves alongside technology.
Bryan Theunissen is a South African doctor with a stubborn streak of optimism. Even after years of watching bad policy win, he still insists on pointing to better choices.