Any fixed amount can be written off as "cost of doing business", given a large enough volume of business.
The penalties for such violations MUST be expressed in units of yearly revenue. It's the only language corporations will understand; it's the only way to keep them on their toes.
In a documentary I watched around 20 years ago, it was mentioned that the cost of human life in an aviation accident was valued at $250,000 per person. So, it was said that aviation companies would do a budget analysis of the cost of fixing the technical problem vs. the lives lost because of it, and the cheapest course of action would be chosen. Not sure how relevant this is today.
I think there ought to be strict technical requirements for the design specifications of such automatic control systems in aircraft. Having only one sensor as the input to a system capable of automatically taking over the controls of an aircraft should be an instant red flag. I'm a control engineer, and routinely include redundancy in my designs, so that the chances of a critical failure are minimized. Even in the event that a failure does occur, there should be systems in place that disable the failed units and smoothly return control to the pilot.
I read Hueristic's article and was surprised that such a poor design of the MCAS system was given the green light. Flight tests are not sufficient, there should have been strict inspections at the design level. The fact that a system passes a set of flight tests just means it works in the conditions it was subjected to, not in every possible situation. Experienced engineers should have inspected the design and should have rejected it straight away when they saw that only one sensor was being used. Such a system will probably pass all flight tests with ease, but it's still a failed design.
Similar guidelines exist in weapon systems design. There may be complicated electronics that solve the fire-control system problem, but the firing command is usually sent to the weapon "outside the loop", by means of mechanical switches that simply short-circuit two wires. It may sound simple, even primitive, but it is very robust and gives total and exclusive control to the weapon system operator, no computer is allowed to fire the weapon on its own.
