Posted on 03/22/2022 7:59:23 AM PDT by RecentlyHeard
Imagine that you manage a chain coffee shop in, say, Kansas City. Youâve been working there for twelve years and have rolled with the changesâhell, you even got used to pumpkin spice. A few years ago, corporate started sending you a different kind of simple syrup, that silent sweetener used in drinks. One day, a customer comes back saying sheâd gotten violently sick after buying some sweetened iced tea from your shop. She got three pumps of sweetener, rather than the standard single pump, at her request.
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Demand Congress Stop ATFâs Secret Rule Making ~ VIDEO
AmmoLand News ^ | 3/21/2022 | Dan Wos
Posted on 3/22/2022, 9:59:23 AM by gunwriter
Over the past 2 years, the ATF has been speaking out of both sides of their mouths by cracking down on solvent traps while saying that the agency does NOT regulate the devices.
Recently AmmoLand News broke the story about a secret rule change involving 80% suppressors ahead of ATFâs official rule change deadline. These new rules were implemented without any public notifications or comment periods.
The new secret rule makes it almost impossible for anyone to make their own silencer. The ATF denied 850 out of 3000 law-abiding Americans the right to build their own suppressors by rejecting their Form 1 application.
(CLICK LINK TO SEE THE VIDEO)
Downfall The Case Against Boeing and the Cost of Profit
Imagine that you manage a chain coffee shop in, say, Kansas City. You’ve been working there for twelve years and have rolled with the changes—hell, you even got used to pumpkin spice. A few years ago, corporate started sending you a different kind of simple syrup, that silent sweetener used in drinks. One day, a customer comes back saying she’d gotten violently sick after buying some sweetened iced tea from your shop. She got three pumps of sweetener, rather than the standard single pump, at her request. You contact corporate and they say, well, she asked for it, so we’re legally in the clear. You tell your line workers to use a different sweetener, and put all of this in an email sent to the entire staff. You explain that the syrup isn’t okay, and is possibly even dangerous to customers. You tell them you’re happy to reimburse the cost of any substitutes they feel like bringing in. Anything will do, really. Corporate hears about this and fires you.
The next day, your branch caters a big corporate birthday party. Three hundred and forty six people, many of them children, die because of the syrup. Corporate blames you and misrepresents your email, even though you don’t work there anymore. The CEO faces no criminal charges and walks away with a $60 million severance package. He says nothing to the victims’ families and, two years later, starts a starts a new publicly-traded business through a shell company without difficulty. You can’t get a job because your name is now synonymous with the “Three Pump Party.”
That did happen but it wasn’t a coffee chain—it was Boeing and the CEO was Dennis Muilenberg. Two years after Lion Air Flight 610 (a Boeing 737 Max) and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 (same) crashed, Muilenburg emerged as the new head of a holding company in the aerospace and defense industry. Boeing has paid steep fines and the company’s fortunes have been decreasing since 2019. On Monday, March 21, a Boeing 737, not a Max, crashed in Guangxi, China. The terrifying fifteen second surveillance video of that plane plummeting straight down may ultimately have more effect on Boeing’s future than any documentary film. Maybe the company will fold and its competitor, Airbus, will take possession of the market. The slavish pursuit of stock performance that drove Boeing after it merged with McDonnell-Douglas in 1997 will turn out to have been its undoing.
But is any of that justice? Boeing escaped any criminal charges by cutting a deal with the final days of the Trump DOJ. The people who worked for Boeing, who made the planes, and the people who paid to fly on them, will get nothing out of these deals. The people at the top took their bonuses and will move on to other companies. It’s not just that it seems to be legal to murder people for profit—there’s also no particular social stigma in being a murderer if you sit a few floors up from the workers.
Rory Kennedy’s Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is a swift and beautifully clear documentary about many things, chief among them the cost of profit above all. Her use of CGI recreations is especially helpful in understanding the savage intervention of something called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System). The 737 Max was a rehauled version of an older plane with bigger engines strapped on to it, rushed to market to compete with a new Airbus model. The MCAS was supposed to address the potential stall created by these heavier engines, but Boeing didn’t want to pay to train their pilots in that software. (You read that right.) The MCAS was controlled by one angle-of-attack sensor, rather than two or more. “The MCAS system is safety critical,” Congressman Peter DeFazio says in Downfall. “And on an airplane, you never ever have a safety-critical system that has a single point of failure.” Once activated, the MCAS pushed the nose of the plane down every ten seconds. Without knowing what was causing this, even the most seasoned pilot wouldn’t be able to save the day. Boeing had essentially built a randomly activated suicide switch into the 737 Max, a fact they knew, discussed, and actively suppressed. It boggles the mind, and Kennedy has presented documentation for all of it.
Boeing knew in 2016 that pilots only had 4 to 10 seconds to respond to the MCAS system before the results would be “catastrophic.” After the Lion Air Flight 610 crash in October of 2018, the FAA found this out, and that more 737 Max crashes were likely over the course of the fleet’s lifetime. The planes were not grounded, though, and the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed a few months later. Boeing, knowing everything they knew, still blamed the pilots in both cases and tried with great zeal to quiet the victims’ families and force them into legal agreements. The deal Boeing struck in the last days of the Trump administration left them paying under $300 million in fines (although it was reported widely as $2.5 billion) and “threw a few pilots under the bus,” as victim’s father Michael Stumo described it on Democracy Now. His daughter, Samya Rose Stumo, 24, died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash.
“Dennis Muilenburg should be defending himself in criminal court right now as the lead conspirator in corporate homicide in two plane crashes,” Stumo told The New Republic. Kennedy relies on Stumo and other relatives of the victims, as well as a few pilots and Andy Pasztor, the Wall Street Journal reporter who covered the aerospace beat for decades. Once a standard bearer for safety and quality, Boeing changed drastically after their 1997 merger with the failing military aircraft supplier McDonnell Douglas. Boeing moved their headquarters from Seattle to Chicago and nothing was ever the same.
Pasztor was eventually able to get a “very senior Boeing executive” to say, on the record, that, “we never informed the pilots about MCAS. We never explained it to them. We never trained them on it, because we didn’t want to overwhelm them with information.” At first, the fact of this deception is what is so shocking, but eventually it’s the brazen quality of the Boeing executives. Kennedy’s title may be prophetic, and Boeing may fall. The people responsible, openly and knowingly responsible, may not fly again but they are walking away, unscathed.
The Boeing “Downfall” story is also a Netflix documentary. I have watched it and still not sure how comfortable I might be on a 737 Max.
Is it normally the aircraft manufacturer’s responsibility to train pilots, or do the airlines usually handle it? And does that vary by country, etc.? Just asking...
Thanks for the readable text...
My wife and I own a home on a small airport South East of Seattle. We just love airplanes and flying. Many if not most of our neighbors are professional pilots. I talked to a few about this when it happened. They were all shocked at the misinformation being pedaled by the media at the time and repeated here by people who had no clue.
And so with this documentary and this article about it... the parade of nonsense continues and I do not have the energy to refute it point by point. Every Boeing pilot that I spoke to was well aware of the eccentricities MCAS system long before the crashes happened. They said that they knew exactly what to do to correct a failure instantly. They were baffled that the 3rd world pilots who augured two good airplanes into the ground and killed all aboard were not the ones being blamed. They get the big bucks to keep their airplanes in the air.
This is not unlike small airplane crashes caused completely by pilot error that law firms specializing in these types of mishaps used to bankrupt the small aircraft manufacturing industry. Small aircraft like the ones that we own cost several times more than what they would because of liability insurance. That is why one of our planes is 50 years old and the other was homemade.
This article is not about the true situation... it is about a line being pedaled by lawyers that resonates with people to ensure that they, not the families of the people who died will reap billion dollar rewards. Boeing, which has been run by woke idiots for years now, still has the best safety record of any airplane manufacturer in the history of the world. They are a large part of the reason that you are more likely to be killed driving to the airport than you are while flying to your destination. Bankrupting them with this ludicrous nonsense will not make anyone any safer and will result in tens of thousands of people losing their jobs.
I guess I'm what some have called a Boeing Apologist, but Boeing had a contract with Southwest that the 737 MAX would only require a few days of online "familiarization" training with no simulator time for Southwest's pilots in order to be certified to fly the MAX. Otherwise, Boeing would owe millions in compensation to Southwest if their pilots needed simulation training to transition to the MAX.
It was because of this commitment to Southwest that MCAS was put into the aircraft in the first place. Because of the larger engine nacelles placed slightly more forward under the wing than the older engine nacelles, when the aircraft was in a high angle of attack at low speed the extra surface area in front of the wing caused the aircraft to suffer a pitchup motion just before stalling. MCAS was to provide nose down trim during these low speed, high angle of attack maneuvers, so the aircraft behaved more like the previous 737 NG.
If it weren't for the potential contract penalties, there would have been no MCAS. Unfortunately, Boeing's implementation of MCAS was flawed in that it didn't cross-check both AOA sensors, but instead just relied on the input from one AOA sensor to make its MCAS decisions. If the AOA sensor was faulty, the MCAS inputs were faulty.
A further flaw was that the Boeing test pilots felt that more MCAS authority was required, so the MCAS system was allowed to provide repeated down trim commands, instead of just a couple of down trims per incident as originally designed. Boeing also never told the FAA that they increased the MCAS authority so much, so the FAA approved the more limited version of the MCAS system without requiring pilot simulator training.
But even with the potential for MCAS failure, it results in a condition called "pitch trim runaway" that all 737 pilots are supposed to be trained in and should be able to identify and correct immediately. It is a "memory" item, which is a procedure that must be memorized without having to refer to a checklist. Regardless of whether the runaway pitch trim was caused by a faulty trim switch or a faulty MCAS, the pilots should have been able to immediately recognize the issue and quickly disable the electric trim system.
After the Lion Air crash, Boeing issued an emergency technical bulletin that runaway pitch trim caused the Lion Air crash, and reminded all operators about the "runaway trim" procedures and required all pilots to review the required steps. There no excuse whatsoever for the Ethiopian Airways crash. They were fully informed about the problem, were told exactly how to counter it if it occurred, but they explicitly ignored the correct runaway procedures and kept re-energizing the electric elevator trim system instead of reverting to the manual trim wheel.
Boeing's technical bulletin issued after the Lion Air crash: https://lbblawyers.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Boeing-Service-Bulletin.pdf
If the Ethiopian Airways flight crew heeded the above bulletin, there would not have been a crash.
You might be interested in my post 9 that I put up while you were typing your reply.
I just read it. Thank you for going into more detail than I did. There were many who attacked me here when this happened for trying to repeat what I was told by people who were flying these airplanes at the time. My own brother is a long-time captain for Southwest.
Why are you excerpting your own site? Blog-pimping is not a good look here.
Your post brought back a few other relevant details that are beginning to come to mind about this, but I would have to check back with those who told me to make sure that I got this right. There was something about the “shaker” warning characteristics in the control yoke that changed from what pilots were used to in the system that Boeing had been using for the previous 50 years.
"But is any of that justice? Boeing escaped any criminal charges by cutting a deal with the final days of the Trump DOJ. The people who worked for Boeing, who made the planes, and the people who paid to fly on them, will get nothing out of these deals. The people at the top took their bonuses and will move on to other companies. It’s not just that it seems to be legal to murder people for profit—there’s also no particular social stigma in being a murderer if you sit a few floors up from the workers."
I think this is blog pimping. Humblegunner?
;>)
Sure looks like it.
I quit flying in July 1996, after TWA800 was shot down, over Long Island. If I can’t get there by driving, I don’t need to go there.
First rule. If the plane is acting weird turn automated stuff off
First rule. If the plane is acting weird turn automated stuff off
This came out of the tragic case of the late New York Yankees catcher Thurman Munson, who lost his life in the 1979 crash of his private jet that he probably had no business flying. Cessna had a deal where they sold private aircraft to customers and included the training/licensing of the aircraft as part of the purchase contract. In the aftermath of Munson's death, his family sued Cessna on the grounds that this arrangement represented an obvious conflict of interest on the part of the company -- namely, that the company has a financial incentive to give the pilot a license regardless of his ability to fly safely, just to complete the sale of the aircraft.
I seem to remember reading that this practice of having manufacturers train and license pilots was discontinued some time after that incident.
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