Trust and technology: the social foundations of aviation regulation John Downer Abstract This paper looks at the dilemmas posed by ‘expertise’ in high-technology regula- tion by examining the US Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) ‘type- certification’ process, through which they evaluate new designs of civil aircraft. It observes that the FAA delegate a large amount of this work to the manufacturers themselves, and discusses why they do this by invoking arguments from the soci- ology of science and technology. It suggests that – contrary to popular portrayal – regulators of high technologies face an inevitable epistemic barrier when making technological assessments, which forces them to delegate technical questions to people with more tacit knowledge, and hence to ‘regulate’ at a distance by evalu- ating ‘trust’ rather than ‘technology’. It then unravels some of the implications of this and its relation to our theories of regulation and ‘regulatory capture’. Keywords: Redundancy; Reliability; aviation regulation; technology assessment; social epistemology Introduction 1 Casual attendees of the Flight Safety Foundation’s 1990 annual International Air Safety Seminar might have been surprised to hear a senior Federal Avia- tion Administration (FAA) official earnestly, but perhaps injudiciously, declare that: ‘The FAA does not and cannot serve as a guarantor of aviation safety’; and that: ‘The responsibility for safe design, operation and maintenance rests primarily and ultimately with each manufacturer and each airline.’ 2 After all, why have a technology regulator if it defers responsibility for safety to the manufacturers? What does regulation mean in such circumstances? The FAA is the USA’s aviation regulator. In theory, it represents the US citizenry: protecting the people’s interests by overseeing, on their behalf, a Downer (Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation, London School of Economics and Political Science) (Corresponding author email: j.r.downer@lse.ac.uk) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01303.x The British Journal of Sociology 2010 Volume 61 Issue 1