Free Republic

"Before the breathin' air is gone...." "Before the sun is just a bright spot in the night-time" The song with those lyrics by Three Dog Night "A Walk In The Country" moving up the Top 40 chart 49 years ago today. I was young back then with fear of nuclear catastrophe being put into me among other things but also the fear of environmental catastrophe.... Fear when I was young expressed into the cassette recorder microphone. It of course reminds me of Greta Thunberg's rage this week: "You stole my childhood" Wow! I was young, I was bullied and sexually...

Operators of certain 737 Next Generation planes will be required to make inspections, the FAA said. The cracking was found in the plane’s pickle forks, which attach the plane’s body to its wing structure, CNN affiliate KOMO reported. Pickle forks are designed to last more than 90,000 landings and takeoffs without cracking, the affiliate said, and there could be dire results if the system fails, it said. In a statement, Boeing said the “cracking issue” was found on a small number of airplanes. “No in-service issues have been reported,” the company said. “Over the coming days, we will work closely...

Federal safety investigators on Thursday said Boeing overestimated how well pilots could handle a flurry of alerts when things go wrong on its 737 Max planes, which have been grounded since March after two fatal crashes killed a total of 346 people. The National Transportation Safety Board issued a series of recommendations for aircraft safety assessments, including factoring in human responses when things go awry, the first formal guidelines since the crashes. A flight-control system designed to prevent the planes from stalling misfired on both crashed flights: a Lion Air 737 Max in Indonesia last October and an Ethiopian...

What we had in the two downed airplanes was a textbook failure of airmanship. In broad daylight, these pilots couldn’t decipher a variant of a simple runaway trim, and they ended up flying too fast at low altitude, neglecting to throttle back and leading their passengers over an aerodynamic edge into oblivion. [Extreme length]

quite disturbing to learn that, contrary to what the press had .. assured us about a supposedly disgruntled aircraft mechanic who got caught trying to disable a Boeing 737, the guy had ISIS video on his cell phone. ... Doesn't everyone with labor beefs against his boss have ISIS video murders on his cell phone? ... Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani might just have been motivated by ISIS's brand of Islamism, not a woikin' man's desire for more overtime. The gullible media reported it otherwise, always eager to look the other way on Islamist terror. ... Alani's phone also had a...

President Donald Trump unveiled a plane model on Thursday demonstrating the new color scheme for Air Force One. The model was spotted on a table in the Oval Office during a meeting between President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “I would say the plane basically is an upgrade over that model. We actually are getting things that they didn’t get. We’re saving about $1.5 billion. So it’s going to be terrific,” Trump told reporters. the new Air Force One will go into service in 2024. Despite some critics lamenting the loss of the baby blue and gold...

Federal Aviation Administrator Steve Dickson says he won’t allow the Boeing 737 Max jets return to the skies for service until he personally flies the plane himself. “I’m the final sign-off authority in the U.S., and I’m not going to sign off on the aircraft until I would fly it myself,” Dickson told NBC News during an interview in Las Vegas. NBC Correspondent Tom Costello pressed Dickson, a former pilot who is licensed to fly the 737, if he will actually pilot the plane on a short flight before officially approving the Max for commercial operation. “I will fly the...

The United States Air Force has just disclosed its official name and designation for its new jet trainer—the T-7A "Red Hawk." The announcement came at the Air Force Association's symposium that opened today outside of Washington, D.C. Acting Air Force Secretary Matt Donovan disclosed the jet's official moniker while standing with one of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, Colonel Charles McGee—a highly decorated veteran with a whopping 409 combat missions spread across WWII, Korea, and Vietnam—by his side. McGee and his Red Hawk squadronmates not only bombed and strafed the Nazis with amazing acumen, they also did the same to...

A former Boeing official who played a key role in the development of the 737 MAX has refused to provide documents sought by federal prosecutors investigating two fatal crashes of the jetliner, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination... Mark Forkner, Boeing’s chief technical pilot on the MAX project, invoked the privilege in response to a grand jury subpoena issued by U.S. Justice Department prosecutors looking into the design and certification of the plane, the person said. Invoking the Fifth to avoid testifying, while a legal right, is sometimes interpreted as an admission of guilt. Its use to resist a...

A door blew off a Boeing 777X as the new plane was undergoing what was supposed to be its final structural inspection by federal regulators. The test is meant to push the plane beyond its limits. Engineers had the plane pressurized and on the ground. They loaded it up well beyond capacity and bent its wings in an extreme manner, in a way almost certain to never happen in the real world. As the ground test was underway and as engineers and FAA inspectors watched, a door blew off the plane. Sources tell KOMO there was a stunned silence after...

Minerals, facing shortage, are key for military hardware, cell phones. Boeing has signed a deal to deploy remote sensing technology to map out U.S. deposits of rare earth elements. The rare earth family of minerals is the real-life version of the precious element "unobtanium" in James Cameron's movie "Avatar." They are used to make everything from military hardware to humble cell phones, but could soon be in short supply as worldwide demand outstrips mining production in China. The aerospace and defense giant announced today that it will confirm rare earth mining claims held by U.S. Rare Earths, Inc. at locations...

MOSCOW, Aug 27 (Reuters) - A unit of Russian conglomerate Rostec said on Tuesday it was ready for an out-of-court settlement with Boeing over its order for 35 Boeing 737 MAX jets, a spokesman for Rostec's subsidiary Avia Capital Service told Reuters. Boeing MAX 737 jets have been grounded worldwide and airlines are cancelling multimillion contracts following crashes in October and March that killed 346 people. Earlier on Tuesday, Rostec said its unit had filed a lawsuit in the United States to cancel its order for the 35 MAX jets. The Financial Times, which first reported the move, said Avia...

The Air Force this week awarded Boeing a contract worth up to almost $1 billion to expand its effort to add new wings to A-10s, shortly after wrapping up a previous initiative that replaced wings on most of the fleet. “The Air Force currently has a fleet of 281 A-10s and recently announced the completion of wing replacements for 173 A-10 aircraft, by Boeing, from an earlier contract award,” the service said in an Aug. 21 release. The Aug. 21 contract allows the Air Force to re-wing up to 109 aircraft, plus three spares, “depending on how many aircraft are...

The new international docking adapter, or IDA, was launched to the station last month aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship. The lab's robot arm pulled the docking mechanism out of the Dragon's trunk section earlier this week and positioned it directly atop a tunnel-like pressurized mating adaptor extending from Harmony's upper port. Working with electrical cables that were routed three years ago during two earlier spacewalks, Hague and Morgan connected the IDA to station power, allowing astronaut Christina Koch, working inside Harmony, to send commands driving internal hooks to close. After flight controllers confirmed the $22.5 million IDA was firmly...

SEATTLE: Boeing Co said on Tuesday it plans to add extra staff and hire "a few hundred" temporary employees at an airport in Washington state where it is storing many grounded 737 MAX jetliners, a key step in its best-case plan for resuming deliveries to airline customers in October. The world's largest planemaker, burning cash as one of the worst crises in its history stretches into a sixth month, said the workers will assist with aircraft maintenance and customer delivery preparations at Grant County International Airport. The hiring plans are the first publicly detailed steps Boeing will take as it...

Almost as soon as the wheels of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 spun free from the runway March 10, the instruments in front of Capt. Yared Getachew went haywire. The digital displays for altitude, airspeed and other basic information showed dramatically different readings from those in front of his co-pilot. The controls in Capt. Getachew’s hands started shaking to warn him the plane was climbing too steeply and was in imminent danger of falling from the sky. Soon, a cascade of warning tones and colored lights and mechanical voices filled the cockpit. The pilots spoke in clipped bursts. “Command!” Capt. Getachew...

SEATTLE — In the days after the first crash of Boeing’s 737 Max, engineers at the Federal Aviation Administration came to a troubling realization: They didn’t fully understand the automated system that helped send the plane into a nose-dive, killing everyone on board. Engineers at the agency scoured their files for information about the system designed to help avoid stalls. They didn’t find much. Regulators had never independently assessed the risks of the dangerous software known as MCAS when they approved the plane in 2017. More than a dozen current and former employees at the F.A.A. and Boeing who spoke...

President Erdogan says Turkey may re-evaluate its procurement of the aircraft from the US following Ankara's suspension from F-35 fighter jet project. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday said that Ankara may have to "re-evaluate" existing orders for Boeing airplanes worth $10 billion, in comments underlining the country's strained ties with the US. "I've told [US President Donald] Trump [at the G20 summit] in Osaka even if Turkey is not buying the Patriot missile system, we are buying Boeing," Erdogan was quoted by Bloomberg. "We are good customers. But if it goes on like this, we'll have to rethink...

The 737 Max has been grounded since mid-March following two fatal crashes. Investigators implicated a piece of new flight-control software in both air disasters that repeatedly pushed the nose of the planes downward. A total of 346 people were killed in the two crashes. The manufacturer on Wednesday posted the biggest quarterly loss in its history as costs piled up and it took a nearly $5 billion charge to compensate airlines affected by the worldwide grounding of the 737 Max, now in its fifth month. Boeing's $4.9 billion charge and the $1.7 billion increase in costs related to the 737...

The aftermath of two crashes of Boeing 737 Max jets shortly after takeoff has led to the global grounding of the airplane. Boeing has been forced to cut production, and even so, undelivered planes are piling up. Big buyers like Southwest American Airlines have been forced to cancel flights during their peak time of year as a result of taking their 737s off line. American lengthened its 737 grounding to June 5 and Southwest, to August 5 [Update: American sent a notice to American Aadvantage members that the grounding would last through August 19]. Even though Boeing is scrambling to...