These airplanes are flying all over the world, the inspections need ultrasonic data, and the FAA has to validate that all of them are done. Even identifying this issue required lots of bureaucracy.

Multiply that by the number of airplanes and airplane models and it's easy to see why they move so slowly: when you are putting millions of people in the air each day, enforcing absurdly specific rules with an iron fist requires a monster of a bureaucracy.

In a perfect world, we would move at a steady pace, as to keep up with the world but without rushing, and people would be accountable without a heavy bureaucratic processes.

Unfortunately, that's not how it works in practice, at least not for long, so between the two, we usually favor the slow and bureaucratic process when safety and reliability matter.

I can understand not changing a system for change sake, but the floppy disk has been obsolete for nearly 20 years now. It's been hard to find a floppy disk reader for the last 10 years. Going so slow that you can't respond to that change is far FAR too slow.

But creating a bureaucracy doesn't mean you've created a rigorous process to ensure safety.

'Move fast and break things' is fine when the result of failure is someone failing to make a billion dollars at their IPO. It's not acceptable in the world where failure means dams break, reactors go supercritical, planes collide, or other similarly apocalyptic scenarios.