May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
Bigger doesn't imply better. Bigger often is a sign of obesity, of lost control, of overcomplexity, of cancerous
cells
From Military-Industrial Complex to Media-Military-Industrial Complex: Review of literature
a
The mainstream media of the US is owned lock, stock, and barrel by the military
industrial complex.
If you want to call it anything, you can call it the ‘military [industrial] media,’ The
military makes money by making war;
they buy the media to promote war... The military industrial media in the United States is depending
on being able to speak
to a captive audience of uninformed viewers… The military controls the media because they own them.-
John Bosnitch
20190116 : Corporatism is the control of government by big business. This is what we have in the USA today. The main difference between corporatism and fascism is the level of repressions against opposition. Corporatism now tales forma of inverted totalitarism and use ostracism instead of phycal repressions ( Jan 16, 2019 , profile.theguardian.com )
"All democracies turn into dictatorships - but not by coup. The people give
their democracy to a dictator, whether it's Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately,
the general population goes along with the idea... That's the issue that I've been exploring:
How did the Republic turn into the Empire ... and how does a democracy become a dictatorship?
"
Tulsi Gabbard is less than 20K individual donations away from getting on the debate stage!
Help her get there by donating just $1 to her campaign!
Tulsi Gabbard 5:21 PM - 22 Mar 2019
Thank you! So far we have 44,255 unique donors of the 65,000 needed to get on the debate
stage! Almost 4,000 people contributed in the last 2 days. I'm humbled by your support. Stay
tuned for updates! pic.twitter.com/UOd5Ky39vf
If Nietzsche was right, and what doesn't kill us only makes us stronger, we can thank the
global capitalist ruling classes, the Democratic Party, and the corporate media for four more
years of Donald Trump. The long-awaited Mueller report is due any day now, or so they keep
telling us. Once it is delivered, and does not prove that Trump is a Russian intelligence
asset, or that he personally conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the presidency from Hillary
Clinton, well, things are liable to get a bit awkward. Given the amount of goalpost-moving and
focus-shifting that has been going on, clearly, this is what everyone's expecting.
Honestly, I'm a bit surprised. I was sure they were going to go ahead and fabricate some
kind of "smoking gun" evidence (like the pee-stained sheets from that Moscow hotel), or coerce
one of his sleazy minions into testifying that he personally saw Trump down on his knees
"colluding" Putin in the back room of a Russian sauna. After all, if you're going to accuse a
sitting president of being a Russian intelligence asset, you kind of need to be able to prove
it, or (a) you defeat the whole purpose of the exercise, (b) you destroy your own credibility,
and (c) you present that sitting president with a powerful weapon he can use to bury you.
This is not exactly rocket science. As any seasoned badass will tell you, when you're
resolving a conflict with another seasoned badass, you don't take out a gun unless you're going
to use it. Taking a gun out, waving it around, and not shooting the other badass with it, is
generally not a winning strategy. What often happens, if you're dumb enough to do that, is that
the other badass will take your gun from you and either shoot you or beat you senseless with
it.
This is what Trump is about to do with Russiagate. When the Mueller report fails to present
any evidence that he "colluded" with Russia to steal the election, Trump is going to reach
over, grab that report, roll it up tightly into a makeshift cudgel, and then beat the snot out
of his opponents with it. He is going to explain to the American people that the Democrats, the
corporate media, Hollywood, the liberal intelligentsia, and elements of the intelligence
agencies conspired to try to force him out of office with an unprecedented propaganda campaign
and a groundless special investigation. He is going to explain to the American people that
Russiagate, from start to finish, was, in his words, a ridiculous "witch hunt," a childish
story based on nothing. Then he's going to tell them a different story.
That story goes a little something like this
Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy
that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump president.
They did this fully aware that Trump was a repulsive, narcissistic ass clown who bragged about
"grabbing women by the pussy" and jabbered about building "a big, beautiful wall" and making
the Mexican government pay for it. They did this fully aware of the fact that Donald Trump had
zero experience in any political office whatsoever, and was a loudmouth bigot, and was possibly
out of his gourd on amphetamines half the time. The American people did not care. They were so
disgusted with being conned by arrogant, two-faced, establishment stooges like the Clintons,
the Bushes, and Barack Obama that they chose to put Donald Trump in office, because, fuck it,
what did they have to lose?
The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by inventing
a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the American
people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives, getting every
organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a
daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to conduct an official
investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every component of the ruling
establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence agencies, the liberal
intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to remove an American president
from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit which kind of amounts to an attempted soft
coup.
This is the story Donald Trump is going to tell the American people.
A minority of ideological heretics on what passes for the American Left are going to help
him tell this story, not because we support Donald Trump, but because we believe that the mass
hysteria and authoritarian fanaticism that has been manufactured over the course of Russiagate
represents a danger greater than Trump. It has reached some neo-Riefenstahlian level, this
bug-eyed, spittle-flecked, cult-like behavior worse even than the mass hysteria that gripped
most Americans back in 2003, when they cheered on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the murder,
rape, and torture of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children based on a bunch of
made-up horseshit.
We are going to be vilified, we leftist heretics, for helping Trump tell Americans this
story. We are going to be denounced as Trumpenleft traitors ,
Putin-sympathizers, and Nazi-adjacents (as we were denounced as terrorist-sympathizers and
Saddam-loving traitors back in 2003). We are going to be denounced as all these things by
liberals, and by other leftists. We are going to be warned that pointing out how the
government, the media, and the intelligence agencies all worked together to sell people
Russiagate will only get Trump reelected, and, if that happens, it will be the End of
Everything.
It will not be the End of Everything.
What might, however, be the End of Everything, or might lead us down the road to the End of
Everything, is if otherwise intelligent human beings continue to allow themselves to be whipped
into fits of mass hysteria and run around behaving like a mindless herd of
propaganda-regurgitating zombies whenever the global capitalist ruling classes tell them that
"the Russians are coming!" or that "the Nazis are coming!" or that "the Terrorists are
coming!"
The Russo-Nazi Terrorists are not coming. The global capitalist ruling classes are putting
down a
populist insurgency , delegitimizing any and all forms of dissent from their global
capitalist ideology and resistance to the hegemony of global capitalism. In the process, they
are conditioning people to completely abandon their critical faculties and behave like
twitching Pavlovian idiots who will obediently respond to whatever stimuli or blatantly
fabricated propaganda the corporate media bombards them with.
If you want a glimpse of the dystopian future it isn't an Orwellian boot in your face. It's
Invasion of the Body Snatchers . Study the Russiagate believers' reactions to the
Mueller report when it is finally delivered. Observe the bizarre intellectual contortions their
minds perform to rationalize their behavior over the last three years. Trust me, it will not be
pretty. Cognitive dissonance never is.
Or, who knows, maybe the Russiagate gang will pull a fast one at the eleventh hour, and
accuse Robert Mueller of Putinist sympathies (or appearing in that FSB video of Trump's
notorious Moscow pee-party), and appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the special
prosecutor. That should get them through to 2020!
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist
based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play
Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
This is clear that the Emollients Law is being broken. Kushner is making a ton of money
and using over seas trips to create a larger establishment for his own empire . He is trying
to make up for his big loses . This truly Breaks all laws of our Government .Using his
position to make money . He needs to go ................
The Family Trump, the people are absolutely no shame, not 1%, to the Millions of poor
Americans, on the Streets, in Tents, on Highways, under Highways!!! Ivanka Trump, she a young
Women, no heart!!! No Empathy to the Millions of poor Amer.
It's not rocket science people! They were raised by corrupt parents and grandparents who
taught them well. Children will model what their parents teach them. They are also children
who are inexperienced & way over their head and very unqualified so they are
overwhelmed.
"... Profit before people. Computer says no! Failsafe failed. No manual over ride. Sorry folks. Say Your prayers. The problem maybe rebranded. Best case scenario. Impeccable flying from technical progress made. ..."
"... Totally unnecessary crash that was caused by cutting corners and greed. ..."
Ethiopian Airlines is one of the best known safe reputation. Of course Indonesian Airlines
is the best too. The crash was very similar after take off and dive into the ground. Boing is
just protecting itself for its market.
Boeing needs to be sued for $2 billion for each victim of the Lion Air and Ethiopian
Airlines plus $300 billion in punitive damages, and jail time for some executives ~ they
knowingly put up unsafe planes. In its early days, the 737 also had several
cashes.
Obviously Boeing knew about the shortcomings of their design in earlier stages and instead
of fixing their design they chose to use a software to fix it without informing the airlines
or giving pilots adequate training in order to save costs.
Profit before people. Computer says no! Failsafe failed. No manual over ride. Sorry folks.
Say Your prayers. The problem maybe rebranded. Best case scenario. Impeccable flying from
technical progress made.
Boeing must be lobbying really hard and it's a shame that a respectable entity like
Washington Post is helping the narrative to shift the blame to pilots who are now dead. If
it's a Boeing, I'll have second thoughts.
1. Boeing wanted a new plane with larger enginers but without spending money on a new
fuselage. 2. Sold their planes to customers saying that Max type is same as the NG and that
no cost is involved for retraining pilots. 3. Make the MCAS system so that the new and plane
and old plane feel theoretically same to the pilot. 4. Not tell pilots about MCAS or hide
critical details about the system. 5. 300+ people dead. I hope the Boeing management can
sleep well knowing they have blood on their hands.
Sounds like they created a dangerously unstable craft that requires a computer system to
keep from stalling. Even if pilot turns off plane may have already got in situation hard to
recover from manually especially near ground. Two planes found this out.
At the root of almost every problem today is 'cost cutting' for short term profits to
satisfy roaming vulture capitalist greed. Why is the FAA 'under funded'? Why is it 'too
expensive' to give pilots the sim time they need even after hundeds of people are
dead??
Engines too far forward wings too swept back computer and pilot can't find center of
balance and it piledrives into earth, its not a mystery. If I wanted to take a perfectly good
737 and turn it into an unflyable plane, well they did it.
Just fix the auto pilot issue. Also, what in all of God's green earth? Pilots only learned
about flying this new model with just textual information? No simulation? No wounder pilots
of both airlines were confound by the conflicting warnings blaring at them in the
cockpit.
Ha ha ha there is no money for the faa, but the government had enough money to go on a
bombing run around the world. So now who is responsible ? Boeing faa or other aviation
authorities like the icao or others ? Who is going to be jailed for this mass murdering?
Since they have accepted it so the faa chief should be put behind bars for lying about the
inspection and the certificate !!!!!!
The pilots made the complaints about the problems these planes are facing but FAA choose
to ignore them. When money and stocks is involved than these parasites don't care about human
lives. This lead to two deadly crash in five months. They know if another plane crash
happened than the media will tear them apart with bare hands.
America is a country of law? FAA has been holding this up and denying any fault about this
737 max 8 issue. If not more and more countries around the world grounding Boeing 737, FAA
will still side Boeing that the plane is 100% safe. And look at the Huawei case, America have
no evidence yet they still can extradite out of an international zone to their country with
this Canadian crook gang up together and Australia and New Zealand.
FAA is directly to blame.... They are the people that certify an aircraft to be airworthy!
There are many aircraft that can't fly without computer assist... FAA's job is to deem them
safe as designed, they are the last line of defence!
It appears that Boeing in their efforts to compete and tonmodernxe it's 737 fleet has
produced a kamikaze passenger planes driven not by pilots but by mcas and suicidal
computers
It's not the FAA fault? Are you blind as well as deaf as well as choked on the government
Kool-Aid? Of course the FAA is to be accused as well as Boeing. If Boeing lied to them then
the FAA needs to take them to court. Otherwise it is complicit in this matter.
Aero FPV 21 hours ago I think its worse than Boeing has us believing. An unbalanced
aircraft requiring a secretive software to fly normal oh and don't tell the pilots about it.
Hmmm
Corporate greed was the outcome of 737 max 8 to compete with a320neo. Shortcuts taken by
Boeing cost 400 lives. So decision makers of this aircraft type must cost them their
jobs!
That "The FAA doesn't have the resources" line doesn't sell for me. I think it has much
more to do with corporate influence in government. This country has gone soft fascist. The
corporate tail is wagging the government watch dog. Could you imagine the outcry if the
public found out about The TWA Flight #800 coverup? And, that's just one example.
Corporations want to keep the public spending and confident in air travel. And, no terrorist
act or software design defect is going to stop the government, media and corporations from
selling air travel.
3:55
It stops where? At the president's desk?And not at the desk of the manager of FAA? It should
have been a professional question, not a political one! This shows even more that not only
the FAA is in the bed with Boeing, the whole government, including the president
is!
With Respecful Sir, Public Voice Just Wont Boeing Have Good And Safety Passenger Flight
Not To Discredit Boeing Airline Company, Before I" Thank You Sir, .....
Cherrio02*.
A computer override system is necessary to overcome a serious design flaw. That is,
engines too large for the old 737 frame. Does any other plane by any manufacturer have this
kind of problem?
It is a Boeing and FAA problem. Not airbus or anyone else. The FAA is tilting the playing
field for American manufactures. That is the impression here.
boeing have a blood in their hand...innocent victems of the ethiopian and indonesian crash
has to blamed on greedy boeing company ,, may their soul rest in peace..rip victems of both
max 8 crash ...
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Operation Allied Force, NATO's 78-day air war against Yugoslavia. It was a war waged
as much against Serbian civilians – hundreds of whom perished – as it was against Slobodan Milošević's forces, and it was a campaign
of breathtaking hypocrisy and selective outrage. More than anything, it was a war that by President Bill Clinton's own admission
was fought for the sake of NATO's credibility.
One Man's Terrorist
Our story begins not in the war-torn Balkans of the 1990s but rather in the howling wilderness of Afghanistan at the end of the
1980s as defeated Soviet invaders withdrew from a decade of guerrilla warfare into the twilight of a once-mighty empire. The United
States, which had provided arms, funding and training for the mujahideen fighters who had so bravely resisted the Soviet occupation,
stopped supporting the jihadis as soon as the last Red Army units rolled across the Hairatan Bridge and back into the USSR. Afghanistan
descended deeper into civil war.
The popular narrative posits that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, Washington's former mujahideen allies, turned on the
West after the US stationed hundreds of thousands of infidel troops in Saudi Arabia – home to two out of three of Sunni Islam's holiest
sites – during Operation Desert Shield in 1990. Since then, the story goes, the relationship between the jihadists and their former
benefactors has been one of enmity, characterized by sporadic terror attacks and fierce US retribution. The real story, however,
is something altogether different.
From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon flew
thousands of al-Qaeda mujahideen, often accompanied by US Special Forces, from Central Asia to Europe to reinforce Bosnian Muslims
as they fought Serbs to gain their independence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The Clinton administration
armed and trained these fighters in
flagrant violation of United Nations accords; weapons purchased by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran were secretly shipped to the jihadists
via Croatia, which netted a hefty profit from each transaction. The official Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in
which thousands of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were slaughtered by Bosnian Serb and Serbian paramilitary forces, concluded
that the United States was "very closely involved" in these arms transfers.
When the Bosnian war ended in 1995 the United States was faced with the problem of thousands of Islamist warriors on European
soil. Many of them joined the burgeoning Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which mainly consisted of ethnic Albanian Kosovars from what
was still southwestern Yugoslavia. Emboldened by the success of the Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians and Bosnians who had won their
independence from Belgrade as Yugoslavia literally balkanized, KLA fighters began to violently expel as many non-Albanians from Kosovo
as they could. Roma, Jews, Turks and, above all, Serbs were all victims of Albanian ethnic cleansing.
The United States was initially very honest in its assessment of the KLA. Robert Gelbard, the US special envoy to Bosnia,
called it "without any question a terrorist
group." KLA backers allegedly included Osama bin Laden
and other Islamic radicals; the group largely bankrolled its activities by trafficking heroin and sex slaves. The State Department
accordingly added the KLA to its list of terrorist organizations in 1998.
However, despite all its nastiness the KLA endeared itself to Washington by fighting the defiant Yugoslavian President Slobodan
Milošević. By this time Yugoslavia, once composed of eight nominally autonomous republics, had been reduced by years of bloody civil
war to a rump of Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. To Serbs, the dominant ethnic group in what remained of the country, Kosovo is regarded
as the very birthplace of their nation. Belgrade wasn't about to let it go without a fight and everyone knew it, especially the Clinton
administration. Clinton's hypocrisy was immediately evident; when Chechnya fought for its independence from Moscow and Russian forces
committed horrific atrocities in response, the American president
called the war an internal Russian affair
and barely criticized Russian President Boris Yeltsin. But when Milošević resorted to brute force in an attempt to prevent Yugoslavia
from further fracturing, he soon found himself a marked man.
Although NATO
called
the KLA "the main initiator of the violence" in Kosovo and blasted "what appears to be a deliberate campaign of provocation" against
the Serbs, the Clinton administration was nevertheless determined to attack the Milošević regime. US intelligence confirmed that
the KLA was indeed provoking harsh retaliatory strikes by Serb forces in a bid to draw the United States and NATO into the conflict.
President Clinton, however, apparently wasn't listening. The NATO powers, led by the United States, issued Milošević an ultimatum
they knew he could never accept: allow NATO to occupy all of Kosovo and have free reign in Serbia as well. Assistant US Secretary
of State James Rubin later
admitted that "publicly we had to make clear we were seeking an agreement but privately we knew the chances of the Serbs agreeing
were quite small."
Wagging the Dog?
In 1997 the film Wag the Dog debuted to rave reviews. The dark comedy concerns a Washington, DC spin doctor and a Hollywood
producer who fabricate a fictional war in Albania to distract American voters from a presidential sex scandal. Many observers couldn't
help but draw parallels between the film and the real-life events of 1998-99, which included the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton's
impeachment and a very real war brewing in the Balkans. As in Wag the Dog , there were exaggerated or completely fabricated
tales of atrocities, and as in the film the US and NATO powers tried to sell their war as a humanitarian intervention. An attack
on Yugoslavia, we were told, was needed to avert Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanians.
There were two main problems with this. First, there was no Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars until after NATO
began mercilessly bombing Yugoslavia. The German government
issued several reports confirming this. One, from October 1998, reads, in part:
The violent actions of the Yugoslav military and police since February 1998 were aimed at separatist activities and are no
proof of a persecution of the whole Albanian ethnic group in Kosovo or a part of it. What was involved in the Yugoslav violent actions
and excesses since February 1998 was a selective forcible action against the military underground movement (especially the KLA) A
state program or persecution aimed at the whole ethnic group of Albanians exists neither now nor earlier.
Subsequent German government reports issued through the winter of 1999 tell a similar story. "Events since February and March
1998 do not evidence a persecution program based on Albanian ethnicity," stated one report released exactly one month before the
NATO bombing started. "The measures taken by the armed Serbian forces are in the first instance directed toward combating the KLA
and its supposed adherents and supporters."
While Serbs certainly did commit atrocities (especially after the ferocious NATO air campaign began), these were often greatly
exaggerated by the Clinton administration and the US corporate mainstream media. Clinton claimed – and the media dutifully parroted
– that 600,000 Albanians were "trapped within Kosovo lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home or buried in mass graves."
This was completely false . US diplomat David
Scheffer claimed that "225,000 ethnic Albanian men are missing, presumed dead." Again, a
total fabrication . The FBI, International War Crimes
Tribunal and global forensics experts flocked to Kosovo in droves after the NATO bombs stopped falling; the total number of victims
they found was around 1 percent of the figure claimed by the United States.
However, once NATO attacked, the Serb response was predictably furious. Shockingly, NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark declared
that the ensuing Serbian atrocities against the Albanian Kosovar population had been
"fully anticipated" and were apparently of little concern to Washington.
Not only did NATO and the KLA provoke a war with Yugoslavia, they did so knowing that many innocent civilians would be killed, maimed
or displaced by the certain and severe reprisals carried out by enraged Serb forces. Michael McGwire, a former top NATO planner,
acknowledged that "to describe the bombing as a humanitarian intervention is really grotesque."
Bloody Hypocrites
The other big problem with the US claiming it was attacking Yugoslavia on humanitarian grounds was that the Clinton administration
had recently allowed – and was at the time allowing – far worse humanitarian catastrophes to rage without American intervention.
More than 800,000 men, women and children were slaughtered while Clinton and other world leaders stood idly by during the 1994 Rwandan
genocide. The US also courted the medievally brutal
Taliban regime in hopes of achieving stability in Afghanistan and with an eye toward building a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through
Afghanistan to Pakistan. Clinton also did nothing to stop Russian forces from viciously crushing nationalist uprisings in the Caucuses,
where Chechen rebels were fighting for their independence much the same as Albanian Kosovars were fighting the Serbs.
Colombia, the Western Hemisphere's leading recipient of US military and economic aid, was waging a fierce, decades-long campaign
of terror against leftist insurgents and long-suffering indigenous peoples. Despite
horrific brutality and pervasive human rights violations, US aid to Bogotá increased year after year. In Turkey, not only did
Clinton do nothing to prevent government forces from committing widespread atrocities against Kurdish separatists, the administration
positively encouraged its NATO ally with billions of dollars in loans and arms sales. Saudi Arabia, home to the most repressive fundamentalist
regime this side of Afghanistan, was – and remains – a favored US ally despite having one of the
world's worst human rights
records. The list goes on and on.
Much closer to the conflict at hand, the United States tacitly approved the largest ethnic cleansing campaign in Europe since
the Holocaust when as many as 200,000 Serbs were
forcibly expelled from the Krajina region of Croatia by that country's US-trained military during Operation Storm in August 1995.
Krajina Serbs had purged the region of its Croat minority four years earlier in their own ethnic cleansing campaign; now it was the
Serbs' turn to be on the receiving end of the horror. Croatian forces stormed through Krajina, shelling towns and slaughtering innocent
civilians. The sick and the elderly who couldn't escape were executed or burned alive in their homes as Croatian soldiers machine-gunned
convoys of fleeing refugees.
"Painful for the Serbs"
Washington's selective indignation at Serb crimes both real and imagined is utterly inexcusable when held up to the horrific and
seemingly indiscriminate atrocities committed during the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia. The prominent Australian journalist
John Pilger noted that "in the attack on Serbia, 2 percent of NATO's missiles hit military targets, the rest hit hospitals, schools,
factories, churches and broadcast studios." There is little doubt that US and allied warplanes and missiles were targeting the Serbian
people as much as, or even more than, Serb forces. The bombing knocked out electricity in 70 percent of the country as well as much
of its water supply.
NATO warplanes also deliberately bombed a building containing the headquarters of Serbian state television and radio in the middle
of densely populated central Belgrade. The April 23, 1999 attack occurred without warning while 200 employees were at work in the
building. Among the 16 people killed were a makeup artist, a cameraman, a program director, an editor and three security guards.
There is no doubt that the attack was meant to demoralize the Serbian people. There is also no doubt that those who ordered the bombing
knew exactly what outcome to expect: a NATO planning document viewed by Bill Clinton, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President
Jacques Chirac forecast as
many as 350 deaths in the event of such an attack, with as many as 250 of the victims expected to be innocent civilians living in
nearby apartments.
Allied commanders wanted to fight a "zero casualty war" in Yugoslavia. As in zero casualties for NATO forces, not the people they
were bombing. "This will be painful for the Serbs," Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon sadistically predicted. It sure was. NATO warplanes
flew sorties at 15,000 feet (4,500 meters), a safe height for the pilots. But this decreased accuracy and increased civilian casualties
on the ground. One attack on central Belgrade mistakenly
hit Dragiša Mišović hospital with a laser-guided "precision" bomb, obliterating an intensive care unit and destroying a children's
ward while wounding several pregnant women who had the misfortune of being in labor at the time of the attack. Dragana Krstić, age
23, was recovering from cancer surgery – she just had a 10-pound (4.5 kg) tumor removed from her stomach – when the bombs blew jagged
shards of glass into her neck and shoulders. "I don't know which hurts more," she lamented, "my stomach, my shoulder or my heart."
Dragiša Mišović wasn't the only hospital bombed by NATO. Cluster bombs dropped by fighter jets of the Royal Netherlands Air Force
struck a hospital and a market in the city of Niš on May 7,
killing 15 people and wounding 60 more. An emergency clinic
and medical dispensary were also bombed in the
mining town of Aleksinac on April 6, killing at least five people and wounding dozens more.
Bridges were favorite targets of NATO bombing. An international passenger train traveling from Belgrade to Thessaloniki, Greece
was
blown apart by two missiles as it crossed over Grdelica gorge on April 12. Children and a pregnant woman were among the 15 people
killed in the attack; 16 other passengers were wounded. Allied commander Gen. Wesley Clark claimed the train, which had been damaged
by the first missile, had been traveling too rapidly for the pilot to abort the second strike on the bridge. He then offered up a
doctored video that was sped up more than three times so that the pilot's behavior would appear acceptable.
On May 1, at least 24 civilians, many of them children, were killed when NATO warplanes
bombed a bridge in Lužane just as a bus was crossing.
An ambulance rushing to the scene of the carnage was struck by a second bomb. On the sunny spring afternoon of May 30, a bridge over
the Velika Morava River in the small town of Vavarin was
bombed by low-flying German Air Force F-16 fighters while hundreds of local residents gathered nearby to celebrate an Orthodox
Christian holiday. Eleven people died, most of them when the warplanes returned and bombed the people who rushed to the bridge to
help those wounded in the first strike.
No One Is Safe
The horrors suffered by the villagers of Surdulica shows that no one in Serbia was safe from NATO's fury. They endured some 175
bombardments during one three-week period alone, with 50 houses destroyed and 600 others damaged in a town with only around 10,000
residents. On April 27, 20 civilians, including 12 children,
died when bombs meant to
destroy an army barracks slammed into a residential neighborhood. As many as 100 others were wounded in the incident. Tragedy
befell the tiny town again on May 31 when NATO
warplanes returned to bomb an ammunition depot but instead hit an old people's home; 23 civilians, most of them helpless elderly
men and women, were blown to pieces. Dozens more were wounded. The US military initially said "there were no errant weapons" in the
attack. However, Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre later testified before Congress that it "was a case of the pilot getting confused."
The CIA was also apparently confused when it relied on what it claimed was an outdated map to approve a Stealth Bomber strike
on what turned out to be the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Three Chinese journalists were killed and 27 other people were wounded.
Some people aren't so sure the attack was an accident – Britain's Observer later
reported that the US deliberately bombed the
embassy after discovering it was being used to transmit Yugoslav army communications.
There were plenty of other accidents, some of them horrifically tragic and others just downright bizarre. Two separate attacks
on the very Albanians NATO was claiming to help killed 160 people, many of them women and children. On April 14, NATO warplanes bombed
refugees along a 12-mile (19-km) stretch of road between the towns of Gjakova and Deçan in western Kosovo, killing 73 people including
16 children and wounding 36 more. Journalists reported
a grisly scene of "bodies charred or blown to pieces, tractors reduced to twisted wreckage and houses in ruins." Exactly one month
later, another column of refugees was
bombed near Koriša, killing
87 – mostly women, children and the elderly – and wounding 60 others. In the downright bizarre category, a wildly errant NATO missile
struck a residential neighborhood in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, some 40 miles (64 km) outside of Serbia. The American AGM-88 HARM
missile blew the roof off
of a man's house while he was shaving in his bathroom.
NATO's "Murderous Thugs"
As the people of Yugoslavia were being terrorized by NATO's air war, the terrorists of the Kosovo Liberation Army stepped up their
atrocities against Serbs and Roma in Kosovo. NATO troops deployed there to keep the peace often failed to protect these people from
the KLA's brutal campaign. More than 164,000 Serbs fled or
were forcibly driven from the Albanian-dominated province and by the summer of 2001 KLA ethnic cleansing had rendered Kosovo almost
entirely Albanian, with just a few die-hard Serb holdouts living in fear and surrounded by barbed wire.
The KLA soon expanded its war into neighboring Macedonia. Although NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson called the terror group
"murderous thugs," the United States – now with George W. Bush as president – continued to offer its invaluable support. National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice personally
intervened in an attempt to persuade Ukraine to halt arms sales to the Macedonian army and when a group of 400 KLA fighters were
surrounded at Aracinovo in June 2001, NATO ordered Macedonian forces to hold off their attack while a convoy of US Army vehicles
rescued the besieged militants. It later
emerged that 17 American military advisers were embedded with the KLA at Aracinovo.
Credibility Conundrum
The bombing of Yugoslavia was really about preserving the credibility of the United States and NATO. The alliance's saber rattling
toward Belgrade had painted it into a corner from which the only way out was with guns blazing. Failure to follow threats with deadly
action, said President Clinton, "would discredit NATO." Clinton
added
that "our mission is clear, to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's purpose." The president seemed willfully ignorant of NATO's
real purpose, which is to defend member states from outside attack. British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed with Clinton,
declaring on the eve of the war that
"to walk away now would destroy NATO's credibility." Gary Dempsey, a foreign policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute,
wrote that the Clinton administration
"transformed a conflict that posed no threat to the territorial integrity, national sovereignty or general welfare of the United
States into a major test of American resolve."
Waging or prolonging war for credibility's sake is always dangerous and seems always to yield disastrous results. Tens of thousands
of US troops and many times as many Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian soldiers and civilians died while Richard Nixon sought an "honorable"
way out of Vietnam. Ronald Reagan's dogged defense of US credibility cost the lives of 299 American and French troops killed in Hezbollah's
1983 Beirut barracks bombing. This time, ensuring American credibility meant backing the vicious KLA – some of whose fighters had
trained at Osama bin Laden's terror camps in Afghanistan. This, despite the fact that al-Qaeda had already been responsible for deadly
attacks against the United States, including the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
It is highly questionable whether bombing Yugoslavia affirmed NATO's credibility in the short term. In the long term, it certainly
did not. The war marked the first and only time NATO had ever attacked a sovereign state. It did so unilaterally, absent any threat
to any member nation, and without the approval of the United Nations Security Council. "If NATO can go for military action without
international blessing, it calls into question the reliability of NATO as a security partner," Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak,
then Moscow's ambassador to NATO, told me at a San Francisco reception.
Twenty years later, Operation Allied force has been all but forgotten in the United States. In a country that has been waging
nonstop war on terrorism for almost the entire 21st century, the 1999 NATO air war is but a footnote in modern American history.
Serbs, however, still seethe at the injustice and hypocrisy of it all. The bombed-out ruins of the old Yugoslav Ministry of Defense,
Radio Television of Serbia headquarters and other buildings serve as constant, painful reminders of the horrors endured by the Serbian
people in service of NATO's credibility.
Brett Wilkins is a San Francisco-based author and activist. His work, which focuses on issues of war and peace and human rights,
is archived atwww.brettwilkins.com
"... "It's a very, very serious investigation into basically, was there fraud by Boeing in the certification of the 737 MAX 8 ?" Arthur Rosenberg, an aviation attorney who is representing six families whose relatives died in the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air crashes, explained. ..."
"... Rosenberg expects the criminal probe to question whether Boeing fully disclosed to the FAA the engineering of the 737 Max 8's MCAS flight control system, called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), during the plane's certification process. The flight control system was designed to prevent the plane from stalling. ..."
"... Unfortunately for Boeing and the passengers its crashed aircraft were carrying, the MCAS system was very poorly implemented. ..."
"... The single sensor was the result of regulatory capture, not to say gaming; see below. ..."
"... Black box data retrieved after the Lion Air crash indicates that a single faulty sensor -- a vane on the outside of the fuselage that measures the plane's "angle of attack," the angle between the airflow and the wing -- triggered MCAS multiple times during the deadly flight, initiating a tug of war as the system repeatedly pushed the nose of the plane down and the pilots wrestled with the controls to pull it back up, before the final crash. ..."
"... Regulatory Capture : Commercial aircraft need to be certified by the FAA before launch. The Washington Post labels today's process "self-certification": ..."
"... In practice, one Boeing engineer would conduct a test of a particular system on the Max 8, while another Boeing engineer would act as the FAA's representative , signing on behalf of the U.S. government that the technology complied with federal safety regulations, people familiar with the process said. ..."
"... (Note that a 10-year-old process would have begun in the Obama administration, so the regulatory process is bipartisan.) I understand that " safety culture " is real and strong, but imagine the same role-playing concept applied to finance: One bankers plays the banker, and the other banker plays Bill Black, and after a time they switch roles . Clearly a system that will work until it doesn't. More: ..."
"... The process was occurring during a period when the Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General was warning the FAA that its oversight of manufacturers' work was insufficient. ..."
"... The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes. ..."
"... Alert readers will note the similarity to the Neoliberal Playbook , where government systems are sabotaged in order to privatize them, but in this case regulatory capture seems to have happened "by littles," rather than out of open, ideological conviction (as with the UKs's NHS, or our Post Office, our Veteran's Administration, etc.). ..."
"... Several FAA technical experts said in interviews that as certification proceeded, managers prodded them to speed the process. Development of the MAX was lagging nine months behind the rival Airbus A320neo. Time was of the essence for Boeing . ..."
"... In this atmosphere, the System Safety Analysis on MCAS, just one piece of the mountain of documents needed for certification, was delegated to Boeing . ..."
"... It should be clear at this point that the central claims of Muilenburg's letter are false. ..."
"... The self-certification debacle that allowed MCAS to be released happened on Muilenburg's watch and is already causing Boeing immense reputational damage, and a criminal case, not to mention the civil cases that are surely coming, will only increase that damage. Mr. Market, the Beltway, and even Trump, if his trade deals are affected, will all soon be bellowing for a sacrificial victim. Muilenburg should recognize the inevitable and gracefully resign. Given his letter, it looks unlikely that he will do the right thing. ..."
"... Beyond that ultimate problem is the ultimate regulatory problem: regulatory capture of the FAA by the airline companies. As a result, the FAA represents "its customers" the airplane makers, not the public users and customers. This is like the banks capturing the Fed, the Justice Dept. and Treasury to promote their own interests by claiming that "self-regulation" works. Self-regulation is the polite word for fraudulent self-indulgence. ..."
"... I would be surprised if the European Airbus competitors do not mount a campaign to block the 737-Max's from landing, and insisting that Boeing buy them back. This gives Airbus a few years to grab the market for these planes. ..."
"... This probably will throw Trump's China trade fight into turmoil, as China was the first country to ground the 737-Max's and is unlikely to permit their recovery without a "real" federal safety oversight program. Maybe Europe, China and other countries henceforth will each demand that their own public agencies certify the plane, so as to represent users and stakeholders, not only stockholders. ..."
"... The moral: Neoliberalism Kills. ..."
"... Rule #2 of Neoliberalism: Go die. ..."
"... > "Maybe Europe, China and other countries henceforth will each demand that their own public agencies certify the plane." ..."
"... As if the 737 MAX were the chlorinated chicken of aircraft. ..."
"... "This gives Airbus a few years to grab the market for these planes." ..."
"... Regulatory capture is rampant throughout the economy. Boeing self-certification being delegated by the FAA is not unlike the situation with electric transmission utilities. ..."
"... that is subject to both FERC and NERC regulation. ..."
"... In hindsight Boeing would have perhaps been better off to leave off the MCAS altogether and depend on pilot retraining to cover the altered handling. ..."
"... Reports I've read indicates that Boeing ignored even the clearly inadequate certification. "Documentation provided to the FAA claims that the MCAS system can only adjust the horizontal tail on the plane by 0.6 degrees out of a maximum of five-degrees of nose-down movement. But that limit was later increased to 2.5-degrees of nose-down movement. Boeing didn't communicate the change from 0.6-degrees to 2.5-degrees until after Lion Air." ..."
"... Boeing could also be liable for damages due to 737 groundings and due to delays in delivery of contracted planes. ..."
"... The analogy has been made between this the 737 MAX story and the Tylenol story. J&J got out in front of the problem and saved the product (and their company). Boeing's problem is of that order, and Muilenberg -- that letter! -- seems incapable of understanding that; insular, arrogant. One more reason to fire the dude toot sweet. If he comes out of his next review with a raise -- Everything Is Like CalPERS™ -- consider shorting Boeing ..."
"... Allowing this to happen seems the ultimate in short term thinking by Boeing. US manufacturers have always had an advantage over competitors because the FAA was held in such high regard worldwide that it was the de facto world safety regulatory body – every country followed its lead. But this chipping away of its authority has led to a near fatal loss of faith, and will no doubt lead to European and Asian regulatory authorities being strengthened. And no doubt commercial realities will mean they will look much more closely at US manufactured aircraft if there is some benefit to their own manufacturers. ..."
"... The Times thinks Boeing is too big to fail. Without a blockbuster Max, I don't see how Boeing maintains its current status in the industry. ..."
"... I also think they have been completely afflicted by the defense contractor mentality. ..."
"... Yes, the famous McDonnell-Douglas reverse takeover , where financial engineers inserted their sucking mandibles into an actual ..."
"... Note that Muilenberg came up through the defense side of the company not the commercial aircraft side. He may simply not have been equipped to understand FAA regulation at any deep level, hence the rot that finally surfaced. ..."
"... The tragedy is that corporate media in pursuit of profits will keep us up to date but will never mention the 6 or 8 minutes of terror for the 346 souls aboard the two flights. They will cover the criminal negligence trial if there are ever indictments. But, the news reports never will say that neoliberalism, deregulation, and privatization are the root causes of the deaths. ..."
"... Boeing also clearly did not know its customers . It should be engineering for the sort of pilots who are going to be hired by Lion Air, or any rapidly expanding airline in what we used to all the Third World. Hegemony, it seems, makes you insular and provincial. ..."
"... "The FAA, citing lack of funding and resource": I don't suppose I'll survive to see any arm of government not blame lack of funds for its boneheaded or corrupt incompetence. ..."
"... That's how I feel. The tech doc department at Boeing sounds like a horrible place to work; MBAs or their goons telling you all the time to do stuff you know is wrong. It's not surprising people were willing to talk to the Seattle Times; I bet there are more people. (Hey, Seattle Times! How about people testing the 737 MAX in simulators (assuming this is done)). ..."
"... Interestingly, and maybe relevant to the problem of confusion for the pilots, is that Boeing has had another automatic trim-modifier operating on its 737s for some time, the speed-trim system (STS): ..."
"... This system also modifies the stabilizer position during manual flight. Like MCAS, it was brought in to improve stability under certain flight conditions (the reasons for which are far beyond my knowledge). There is an indication that the pilots on the flight before the Lion Air crash misinterpreted MCAS actions for STS behavior. ..."
"... authority would revert to the pilot ..."
"... How many years ago did Wall Street take over the fortunes of the company? Why did they move their headquarters from their birthplace of Seattle to Chicago? Why did they start assembling planes in South Carolina and China? Was it to improve aviation safety? Or, to allow the profiteering parasites to feed off the carcass of the company? ..."
"... President Trump, here's a reelection tip: "Today I am declaring that all American registered aircraft flying in American airspace must be maintained in the U.S." ..."
"... Amazingly, Trump seems to have done OK on this. First, he didn't cave to Muilenberg's (insane, goofy, tone-deaf) request to keep the 737 flying; then he frames the issue as complexity (correct, IMNSHO), and then he manages to nominate a Delta CEO as head of the FAA . ..."
"... we're seeing signs that a crapification process has begun on the safety side in this industry. (It has been proceeding for years on the service/amenities side.) ..."
"... Considering the fact that all these 737s are grounded as no airline trust them to not kill a plane load of passengers and crew, this is a really big deal. Putting aside the technical and regulatory issues, the fact is that the rest of the world no longer trusts the US in modern aviation so what we have here is a trust issue which is an even bigger deal. ..."
"... Loss or at least wobbliness of imperial hegemony, like. It's not just the aircraft, it's US standards-setting bodies, methods, "safety culture," even -- dare we say it -- English as the language of aviation. French is no longer the language of diplomacy, after all, though it had a good run. ..."
"... Because markets. Neoliberalism puts everything up for sale. Including regulation. Oversimplifying absurdly: And so you end up with the profit-driven manufacturer buying the regulator, its produce killing people, and the manufacturer canceling its future profits. That's what the Bearded One would call a contradiction.* ..."
"... know your customer ..."
"... Like you, I am a retired software engineer, so I have followed an aviation blog discussion of this issue quite closely since it emerged as a probable software and system design failure. As the blog is open to all, its signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low, but it seems not too difficult for any technically-minded person to separate the wheat from the chaff. My current understanding, which I believe others here are in a position to correct, if necessary: ..."
"... this story is really fascinating and seems to be true a sign of the times. ..."
"... The Post's article on the FAA and Regulatory Capture is incomplete. The process for the FAA (and probably MANY government agencies) started under Reagan, did not revert to safety under Clinton (make government smaller and all that), and then accelerated under Bush II in 2005 (not a bi-partisan time). In particular, big changes to the FAA were made in 2005 that were executive in nature and did not require Congressional approval. CF: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/delegating-aircraft-safety-assessments-to-boeing-is-nothing-new-for-the-faa/ ..."
At some point in the future, I'd like to do failure matrix for the pathways to misfortune (
example of such a matrix here ) that precipitated
two deadly Boeing 737 MAX crashes on take-off in five months , but I don't feel that I have enough information yet. (I'm not
unsympathathetic to the view
that the wholesale 737 MAX grounding was premature on technical grounds , but then trade and even geopolitical factors enter
in, given that Boeing is a "national champion.") We do not yet have results from the cockpit voice and flight data recorders of either
aircraft, for example. But what we do know is sufficiently disturbing -- a criminal investigation into Boeing had already been initiated
after the Lion Air crash, but before the Ethiopian Airlines crash -- that I think it's worthwhile doing a play-by-play on the causes
of the crashes, so far as we can know them.
About that criminal investigation
:
According to the Wall Street Journal, a Washington D.C. grand jury issued a March 11 subpoena requesting emails, correspondence,
and other messages from at least one person involved in the development of the aircraft.
"It's a very, very serious investigation into basically, was there fraud by Boeing in the certification of the 737
MAX 8 ?" Arthur Rosenberg, an aviation attorney who is representing six families whose relatives died in the Ethiopian Airlines
and Lion Air crashes, explained.
"Nobody knows the answer to that yet," Rosenberg cautioned, adding that he had not yet seen the Justice Department's subpoena
and therefore could not know its full scope.
Rosenberg expects the criminal probe to question whether Boeing fully disclosed to the FAA the engineering of the 737 Max
8's MCAS flight control system, called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), during the plane's certification
process. The flight control system was designed to prevent the plane from stalling.
A possible criminal investigation during an aircraft accident investigation is highly unusual . While airline accidents
have at times raised criminal issues, such as after the 1996 crash of a ValuJet plane in the Florida Everglades, such cases are
the exception.
Safety is at the core of who we are at Boeing, and ensuring safe and reliable travel on our airplanes is an enduring value
and our absolute commitment to everyone. This overarching focus on safety spans and binds together our entire global aerospace
industry and communities. We're united with our airline customers, international regulators and government authorities in our
efforts to support the most recent investigation, understand the facts of what happened and help prevent future tragedies. Based
on facts from the Lion Air Flight 610 accident and emerging data as it becomes available from the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302
accident, we're taking actions to fully ensure the safety of the 737 MAX. We also understand and regret the challenges for our
customers and the flying public caused by the fleet's grounding.
Boeing has been in the business of aviation safety for more than 100 years, and we'll continue providing the best products,
training and support to our global airline customers and pilots. This is an ongoing and relentless commitment to make safe
airplanes even safer .
Soon we'll release a software update and related pilot training for the 737 MAX that will address concerns discovered in the
aftermath of the Lion Air Flight 610 accident.
Fine words. Are they true? Can Boeing's "commitment to everyone to ensure " safe and reliable travel" really be said to be "absolute"?
That's a high bar. Let's see!
I've taken the structure that follows from
a tweetstorm by Trevor Sumner (apparently derived from
a Facebook post by his brother-law,
Dave Kammeyer ). However, I've added topic headings, changed others,
and helpfully numbered them all, so you can correct, enhance, or rearrange topics easily in comments (or even suggest new topics).
Let me also caveat that this is an enormous amount of material, and time presses, so this will not be as rich in links as I would
normally like it to be. Also note that the level of abstraction for each topic varies significantly: From "The Biosphere" all the
way to "Pilot Training." A proper failure matrix would sort that out.
* * *
(1) The Biosphere : The 737 MAX story beings with a customer requirement for increased fuel efficiency. This is, at bottom,
a carbon issue (and hence a greenhouse gas issue , especially as the demand for air travel increases, especially in Asia). New
biosphere-driven customer demands will continue to emerge as climate change increases and intensifies, and hence the continued 737
MAX-like debacles should be expected, all else being equal. From
CAPA – Centre for Aviation :
The main expected impacts of climate change on aviation result from changes in temperature, precipitation (rain and snow),
storm patterns, sea level and wind patterns. In addition, climate change is expected to lead to increased drought, impacts on
the supply of water and energy, and changes in wildlife patterns and biodiversity. Consequences for aviation include reduced aircraft
performance, changing demand patterns, potential damage to infrastructure, loss of capacity and schedule disruption.
All of these factors will affect aircraft design, manufacturing, maintenance, and use, stressing the system.
(2) Choice of Airframe :
The Air Current
describes the competitive environment that led Boeing to upgrade the 737 to the 737 MAX, instead of building a new plane:
Boeing wanted to replace the 737. The plan had even earned the endorsement of its now-retired chief executive. We're gonna
do a new airplane," Jim McNerney
said in February of that same year. "We're not done evaluating this whole situation yet, but our current bias is to not re-engine,
is to move to an all-new airplane at the end of the decade." History went in a different direction. Airbus, riding its
same decades-long incremental strategy and chipping away at Boeing's market supremacy, had made no secret of its plans to
put new engines on the A320. But its own re-engineered jet somehow managed to take Boeing by surprise. Airbus and American forced
Boeing's hand. It had to put new engines on the 737 to stay even with its rival .
Why? The earlier butchered launch of the 787:
Boeing justified the decision thusly: There were huge and excruciatingly painful near-term obstacles on its way to a new single-aisle
airplane. In the summer of 2011, the 787 Dreamliner wasn't yet done after billions invested and years of delays. More than 800
airplanes later here in 2019, each 787 costs less to build than sell, but it's
still running a $23 billion production
cost deficit. .
The 737 Max was Boeing's ticket to holding the line on its position "both market and financial" in the near term. Abandoning
the 737 would've meant walking away from its golden goose that helped finance the astronomical costs of the 787 and the development
of the 777X.
So, we might think of Boeing as a runner who's tripped and fallen: The initial stumble, followed by loss of balance, was the 787;
with the 737 MAX, Boeing hit the surface of the track.
(3) Aerodynamic Issues : The
Air Current
also describes the aerodynamic issues created by the decision to re-engine the 737:
Every airplane development is a series of compromises, but to deliver the 737 Max with its promised fuel efficiency, Boeing
had to fit 12 gallons into a 10 gallon jug. Its bigger engines made for creative solutions as it found a way to mount the larger
CFM International turbines under the notoriously low-slung jetliner. It lengthened the nose landing gear by eight inches, cleaned
up the aerodynamics of the tail cone, added new winglets, fly-by-wire spoilers and big displays for the next generation of pilots.
It pushed technology, as it had done time and time again with ever-increasing costs, to deliver a product that made its jets more-efficient
and less-costly to fly.
In the case of the 737 Max, with its nose pointed high in the air, the larger engines "generating their own lift" nudged it
even higher. The risk Boeing found through analysis and later flight testing was that under certain high-speed conditions both
in wind-up turns and wings-level flight, that upward nudge created a greater risk of stalling.
Its solution was MCAS , the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System control law that would allow for both generations
of 737 to behave the same way. MCAS would automatically trim the horizontal stabilizer to bring the nose down, activated with
Angle of Attack data. It's now at the center of the Lion Air investigation and stalking the periphery of the Ethiopian crash.
(4) Systems Engineering : Amazingly, there is what in a less buttoned-down world that commercial aviation would be called a Boeing
737 fan site, which describes the MCAS system in more technical terms
:
MCAS was introduced to counteract the pitch up effect of the LEAP-1B engines at high AoA [Angle of Attack]. The engines were
both larger and relocated slightly up and forward from the previous NG CFM56-7 engines to accomodate their larger diameter. This
new location and size of the nacelle causes it to produce lift at high AoA; as the nacelle is ahead of the CofG [Center of Gravity]
this causes a pitch-up effect which could in turn further increase the AoA and send the aircraft closer towards the stall. MCAS
was therefore introduced to give an automatic nose down stabilizer input during steep turns with elevated load factors (high AoA)
and during flaps up flight at airspeeds approaching stall.
Unfortunately for Boeing and the passengers its crashed aircraft were carrying, the MCAS system was very poorly implemented.Reading between the lines (I've helpfully labeled the pain points):
Boeing have been working on a software modification to MCAS since the Lion Air accident. Unfortunately although originally
due for release in January it has still not been released due to both engineering challenges and differences of opinion among
some federal and company safety experts over how extensive the changes should be.
Apparently there have been discussions about potentially adding [A] enhanced pilot training and possibly mandatory [B] cockpit
alerts to the package. There also has been consideration of more-sweeping design changes that would prevent [C] faulty signals
from a single sensor from touching off the automated stall-prevention system.
[A] Pilot training was originally not considered necessary, because MCAS was supposed to give 737 MAX the same flight
characteristics as earlier 737s; that's why pilots weren't told about it. (This also kept the price low.) [B] Such alerts exist now,
as part of an optional package, which Lion did not buy. [C] The single sensor was the result of regulatory capture, not to say
gaming; see below.
(The MCAS system is currently the system fingered as the cause of both the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes; we won't know for sure
until the forensics are complete. Here, however, is
the scenario for an MCAS-induced crash :
Black box data retrieved after the Lion Air crash indicates that a single faulty sensor -- a vane on the outside of the
fuselage that measures the plane's "angle of attack," the angle between the airflow and the wing -- triggered MCAS multiple times
during the deadly flight, initiating a tug of war as the system repeatedly pushed the nose of the plane down and the pilots wrestled
with the controls to pull it back up, before the final crash.
(5) Regulatory Capture : Commercial aircraft need to be certified by the FAA before launch. The
Washington Post labels today's process "self-certification":
The FAA's publication of pilot training requirements for the Max 8 in the fall of 2017 was among the final steps in a multiyear
approval process carried out under the agency's now 10-year-old policy of entrusting Boeing and other aviation manufacturers to
certify that their own systems comply with U.S. air safety regulations.
In practice, one Boeing engineer would conduct a test of a particular system on the Max 8, while another Boeing engineer
would act as the FAA's representative , signing on behalf of the U.S. government that the technology complied with federal safety
regulations, people familiar with the process said.
(Note that a 10-year-old process would have begun in the Obama administration, so the regulatory process is bipartisan.) I
understand that " safety culture " is real and strong, but imagine the same
role-playing concept applied to finance: One bankers plays the banker, and the other banker plays Bill Black, and after a time they
switch roles . Clearly a system that will work until it doesn't. More:
The process was occurring during a period when the Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General was warning
the FAA that its oversight of manufacturers' work was insufficient.
Four years after self-certification began, fires aboard Boeing's 787 Dreamliner jets led to the grounding of the fleet and
a wave of questions about whether self-certification had affected the FAA's oversight.
Why "self-certification"? Investigative reporting from
the Seattle Times -- the article is worth reading in full -- explains:
The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more
of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes.
Alert readers will note the similarity to
the Neoliberal Playbook , where government systems are sabotaged in order to privatize them, but in this case regulatory capture
seems to have happened "by littles," rather than out of open, ideological conviction (as with the UKs's NHS, or our Post Office,
our Veteran's Administration, etc.).
(6) Transfer of Authority to Boeing : In the case of the 737 Max, regulatory capture was so great that certification authority
was transferred to Boeing. In order to be certified, a "System Safety Analysis" for MCAS had to be performed.
The Seattle Times :
The safety analysis:
Understated the power of the new flight control system, which was designed to swivel the horizontal tail to push the nose of the
plane down to avert a stall. When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther
than was stated in the initial safety analysis document.
Failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of
the system repeatedly pushing the airplane's nose downward. Assessed a failure of the system as one level below "catastrophic."
But even that "hazardous" danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor --
and yet that's how it was designed.
So who certified MCAS? Boeing self-certified it. Once again
The Seattle Times :
Several FAA technical experts said in interviews that as certification proceeded, managers prodded them to speed the process.
Development of the MAX was lagging nine months behind the rival Airbus A320neo. Time was of the essence for Boeing .
"There wasn't a complete and proper review of the documents," the former engineer added. "Review was rushed to reach certain
certification dates."
In this atmosphere, the System Safety Analysis on MCAS, just one piece of the mountain of documents needed for certification,
was delegated to Boeing .
(I'm skipping a lengthy discussion of even more technical detail for MCAS, which includes discrepancies between what Boeing self-certified,
and what the FAA thought that it had certified, along with the MCAS system acting like a ratchet, so it didn't reset itself, meaning
that each time it kicked in, the nose was pitched down even lower. Yikes. Again, the article is worth reading in full; if you've
ever done tech doc, you'll want to scream and run.)
(7) Political Economy : This tweet is especially interesting, because even I know that
Muddy Waters Research is a famous short seller:
What's the
result? Two $BA planes have been grounded:
787 and Max. Last FAA grounding of a type of plane was 1979. In the case of the Max, FAA outsourced more than planned bc BA was
9 months behind Airbus 320neo 3/4 2 replies 4 retweets 19 likes
This is a great example of real short-termism by a corporate. It's clearly in
$BA LT interest to have robust cert system,
but those chickens come home to roost years later, allowing mgmt to meet ST expectations. BTW, semi-annual reporting would do
NOTHING to fix this mentality. 4
And here we are! There are a myriad of other details, but many of them will only prove out once the black boxes are examined and
the forensics are complete.
* * *
It should be clear at this point that the central claims of Muilenburg's letter are false. I understand that commercial
aviation is a business, but if that is so, then Muilenburg's claim that Boeing's commitment to safety is "absolute" cannot possibly
be true; indeed, the choice to re-engine the 737 had nothing to do with safety. Self-certification makes Boeing "a judge in its own
cause," and that clearly contradicts Muilenburg's absurd claim that "safety" -- as opposed to profit -- "is at the core of who we
are."
The self-certification debacle that allowed MCAS to be released happened on Muilenburg's watch and is already causing Boeing
immense reputational damage, and a criminal case, not to mention the civil cases that are surely coming, will only increase that
damage. Mr. Market, the Beltway, and even Trump, if his trade deals are affected, will all soon be bellowing for a sacrificial victim.
Muilenburg should recognize the inevitable and gracefully resign. Given his letter, it looks unlikely that he will do the right thing.
IIRC, one of the big constraints that was leveled was the need to keep the 737, regardless of version, into the same height
relative to all other generations of the 737, whereas Airbus kept their height a lot higher than the 737.
If you look at many 737's over the years, some of the engine's nacelles were flat at the bottom to accommodate larger engine.
Why? Boeing kept the height the same in order to maintain built-in stairs that, with virtually all airports having adjustable
jetways, was basically redundant.
When you compare an A320xeo against a B737, you'll find that the Airbus rides higher when it comes to the jetways.
It seems to me that the Boeing 737-Max with the heavier, larger fuel-saving engines is so unbalanced (tilting over and then
crashing if not "overridden" by a computer compensation) that it never should have been authorized in the first place.
When Boeing decided to add a much larger engine, it should have kept the airplane in balance by (1) shifting it forward or
backward so that the weight did not tip the plane, and (2) created a larger landing-gear base so that the large engines wouldn't
scrape the ground.
The problem was that Boeing tried to keep using the old chassis with the larger engines under the wings – rather than changing
the wings, moving them forward or aft, and expanding the plane to permit a more appropriate landing gear.
The computer system has been blamed for not being a "smart enough" workaround to tell the plane not to plunge down when it
already is quite close to the ground – with no perception of altitude, not to mention double-checking on the wind speed from both
sensors.
Beyond that ultimate problem is the ultimate regulatory problem: regulatory capture of the FAA by the airline companies.
As a result, the FAA represents "its customers" the airplane makers, not the public users and customers. This is like the banks
capturing the Fed, the Justice Dept. and Treasury to promote their own interests by claiming that "self-regulation" works. Self-regulation
is the polite word for fraudulent self-indulgence.
I would be surprised if the European Airbus competitors do not mount a campaign to block the 737-Max's from landing, and
insisting that Boeing buy them back. This gives Airbus a few years to grab the market for these planes.
This probably will throw Trump's China trade fight into turmoil, as China was the first country to ground the 737-Max's
and is unlikely to permit their recovery without a "real" federal safety oversight program. Maybe Europe, China and other countries
henceforth will each demand that their own public agencies certify the plane, so as to represent users and stakeholders, not only
stockholders.
> "Maybe Europe, China and other countries henceforth will each demand that their own public agencies certify the plane."
As if the 737 MAX were the chlorinated chicken of aircraft.
* * *
I'm not sure about redesigning the wing and the landing gear. That might be tantamount to designing a new plane. (I do know
that the landing gear is so low because the first 737s needed to accommodate airports without jetways, and so there may be other
facets of the design that also depend on those original requirements that might have to be changed.)
Regulatory capture is rampant throughout the economy. Boeing self-certification being delegated by the FAA is not unlike
the situation with electric transmission utilities.
After the 2003 northeast & Canada blackout, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. It directed FERC to create an "electric
reliability organization". Previously there were voluntary organizations set up after the 1966 blackout to establish operating
standards in the industry. One of them was the North American Electric Reliability Council which morphed into the North
American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) in 2006.
NERC is headquartered in Atlanta and employs hundreds of people. The standards setting generally takes place in NERC Committees
and Subcommittees and sometimes from FERC itself. These are typically packed with industry people, with a patina of diversity
that includes some governmental types and large industrial consumers. Let it suffice to say the electric transmission industry
itself largely sets the rules how it operates.
Now consider the article in yesterday's NYT "
How PG&E Ignored
California Fire Risks in Favor of Profits ". The transmission circuit featured in the article (the Caribou-Palermo line) that
caused the destruction of Paradise is a transmission line that is subject to both FERC and NERC regulation. As described
in the article the circuit had many previous failures and was well beyond its design life.
However, both FERC and NERC have a laser focus on "market players" (think Enron or JP Morgan) and system operations (e.g.,
prevent collapses like the blackout of 2003). AFIK, neither FERC or NERC have prescriptive standards for routine maintenance or
inspection and replacement (i.e., very expensive capital replacement that was not done on the Caribou-Palermo line), these are
left to the discretion of the transmission owner. While substantive information about electric reliability is maintained by industry
trade groups and submitted to FERC, what is available to the public is generally useless and subjected to scrubbing and polishing
(often under the guise of Critical Energy Infrastructure Information).
We can see how self-policing work, can't we??? Rent-seeking market players can arbitrage markets, inflating prices consumers
pay and make billions in profits, while California burns.
The neglectful rot in California is endemic in the industry as a whole.
That Seattle Times investigative story is indeed very good and a rare instance of newspaper writers troubling to carefully
and cogently explain a technical issue.
In hindsight Boeing would have perhaps been better off to leave off the MCAS altogether and depend on pilot retraining
to cover the altered handling.
One reason they may not have was that crash several years ago of a commuter plane in upstate NY where the plane started to
stall and the confused pilot pulled up on the controls rather than making the airplane dive to regain speed. Still one has to
believe that no automation is better than badly designed or malfunctioning automation.
"depend on pilot retraining to cover the altered handling"
IANAP, but maybe the problem is that "nose up" situations can go south very quickly. For those with the stomach for it, there
are videos on youtube of the 747 freighter that went nose up at Bagram a few years ago (perhaps due to loose cargo shifting backwards
on takeoff). It was over very quickly.
Yes, I was impressed with it. Unfortunately the investigation precludes Boeing from responding as they did indicate they would
have had something to say about it otherwise. But the analysis looks pretty cut and dried:
Boeing underestimated the risk rating for the sensor, excluding the possibility of a catastrophic failure as occurred in
the two incidents to date;
Boeing also failed to implement the redundancy that would have been required even for their lower risk rating;
Manual correction by the pilot as a possible risk mitigation was constrained by the fact that pilots weren't trained on
the new system due to commercial factors.
Fixing any one of those three issues would have averted the disasters, although #3 is pretty precarious as you're relying on
manual pilot actions to correct what is a clear systems defect at that point.
It sounds like #1 was partly because they failed to account for all the scenarios, like repeat activation raising the risk
profile in certain circumstances. This is very easy to do and a robust review process is your best defense. So we could add the
tight timelines and rushed process as a contributing factor for #1, and probably the others as well.
People who work on accident investigation would probably agree on 2 things:
(o) Accidents are invariably a confluence of a myriad of factors that all happened to line up on one day. There is never
a single cause of an accident.
(o) A minor change to some part of the system would have prevented the accident.
So while there is much to be profitably learned by investigating everything here, an effective "fix" may be surprisingly (or
suspiciously) small in scope. There will be much clamoring for the whole plane to be resigned or scrapped, for better or worse.
The Colgan crash, whose pilot, Renfrew, was chatting with the co-pilot below the allowed altitude? And who had apparently lied
about his background, and had a pay-to-play pilot's license?
I think the Air France Airbus 447 also had a high-altitude stall (due to a faulty air speed sensor) and needed its nose pushed
down, not up (which the copilots didn't realize).
Also, very informative article / OP, thanks for posting.
MCAS was added to change the behavior of the plane from to tend to stall as speed increases. That is stall and crash, because
such a high speed stall makes polit recovery very, very difficult.
In addition the MCAS driven amount of elevator change was initially 0.6 to 2.5, which indicates the 0.6 increment was found
to be too low.
According to a detailed FAA briefing to legislators, Boeing will change the MCAS software to give the system input from
both angle-of-attack sensors.
It will also limit how much MCAS can move the horizontal tail in response to an erroneous signal. And when activated, the
system will kick in only for one cycle, rather than multiple times.
Boeing also plans to update pilot training requirements and flight crew manuals to include MCAS.
–Seattle Times
So apparently the greater elevator setting is not so necessary that they are not willing to reduce it. Also the max power setting
would normally be on take off when the pilots are required to manually fly the plane.
Yes, that was an excellent Seattle times piece. Surprising to see that kind of truth-telling and, especially, *clarity* in
an MSM piece these days. So what's the angle?
Reports I've read indicates that Boeing ignored even the clearly inadequate certification. "Documentation provided to the
FAA claims that the MCAS system can only adjust the horizontal tail on the plane by 0.6 degrees out of a maximum of five-degrees
of nose-down movement. But that limit was later increased to 2.5-degrees of nose-down movement. Boeing didn't communicate the
change from 0.6-degrees to 2.5-degrees until after Lion Air."
Apparently this was done after simulations showed that 0.6 degrees was inadequate and the new 2.5 degree setting was not extensively
tested before the planes were rolled out. IANAL, but this may be a serious problem for Boeing. Boeing could also be liable
for damages due to 737 groundings and due to delays in delivery of contracted planes.
Big question is how 737 issues will affect 777X rollout, due at the end of the year. If 777X certification is called into question,
this may cause further delays and put it at a further disadvantage against A350.
The 777 has been a great plane. Let's all pray the MBAs didn't fuck it up, too.
If I were Boeing, I'd have a team looking into the 777 certification process right now. And I'd set up a whistleblower line
(so the Seattle Times doesn't get to the story first).
The analogy has been made between this the 737 MAX story and the Tylenol story. J&J got out in front of the problem and
saved the product (and their company). Boeing's problem is of that order, and Muilenberg -- that letter! -- seems incapable of
understanding that; insular, arrogant. One more reason to fire the dude toot sweet. If he comes out of his next review with a
raise -- Everything Is Like CalPERS™ -- consider shorting Boeing
Thanks, Lambert, for post and comments. I don't know if this angle has been covered or explored: the relatively new way that
Boeing now "manufactures" "tests" and "assembles" parts of its planes. I had dinner with new acquaintance, Boeing engineer for
decades (I live near a plant in WA state). For the last few years, this engineer is stationed half year in Russia annually to
oversee assembly there. In this newish, more profitable manufacturing system for Boeing, the parts come in from around the world
with sketchy quality control, are then assembled by Russian workers this engineer (and other Boeing employees sent from States)
supposedly oversees. But the engineer doesn't speak Russian and has too little access to translators .Needless to say, this engineer
is planning an exit as soon as possible. Having grown up in WA state for 60 years with neighbors/friends who were Boeing engineers,
assemblers, line workers, etc it makes me heart sick to see the current decimation of talent, rigor and wages with additional
far-flung assembly factories (Russia with few translators?! who knew?). Might these manufacturing/assemblying "improvements" also
be a contributing factor in these terrifying woes for Boeing?
Thanks for this Lambert, fantastically informative and interesting post.
Self regulation only works when liability is transferred with it – over example, in construction whereby certification by the
engineers or architects designing the building are also taking on liability in the event something goes wrong. It seems unlikely
that this is the situation with Boeing.
Allowing this to happen seems the ultimate in short term thinking by Boeing. US manufacturers have always had an advantage
over competitors because the FAA was held in such high regard worldwide that it was the de facto world safety regulatory
body – every country followed its lead. But this chipping away of its authority has led to a near fatal loss of faith, and will
no doubt lead to European and Asian regulatory authorities being strengthened. And no doubt commercial realities will mean they
will look much more closely at US manufactured aircraft if there is some benefit to their own manufacturers.
Airbus will no doubt try to take advantage – just as Boeing (with some justification) tried to focus attention on the Air France
Airbus loss which was attributed at least in part to excessive automation. China is pushing hard with its new Comac aircraft,
but they seem to be poorly regarded worldwide (only Chinese airlines are buying). The Canadians have missed their chance with
the Bombadier C-series.
The more I read of this the more baffling it is. What was there stopping Boeing from just highlighting the changes and installing
an easy manual override instead of this hidden change with effectively no way to permanently do so? Especially when in crisis
mode? One could make a case of no extra training needed so long as the pilot knows about it and can easily turn it off.
I didn't see this before I posted my response. A more concise statement of my thoughts. This plus more robust redundant sensors.
Penny wise and pound foolish.
The Times thinks Boeing is too big to fail. Without a blockbuster Max, I don't see how Boeing maintains its current status
in the industry.
I am leaning towards thinking the kludgy design of the 727 Max could have been rolled out with no major problems if Boeing
had been up front about design changes, made a robust and conservative MCAS, fully at the command of the pilot, and provided ample
training for the new aircraft.
They still could have saved billions on the airframe. They would have had to acknowledge the significant modifications to the
airlines with the attendant training and other costs and delays. They would have lost some sales. They still would have been far
ahead of Airbus and light years ahead of where they are now.
I also think they have been completely afflicted by the defense contractor mentality.
Note that Muilenberg came up through the defense side of the company not the commercial aircraft side. He may simply not
have been equipped to understand FAA regulation at any deep level, hence the rot that finally surfaced.
The 737 Max crashes and Brexit are the chickens coming home to roost. NC is a treasure for your coverage of both.
Clearly upper management in Chicago only knows short term finance. Boeing stuck with old fashion hydraulic controls in the
737 but faced with an unacceptable flight characteristics of the larger more efficient engines added a fly-by-wire system to compensate
for it.
The criminal charges are that besides being a faulty design (it relies on one fragile exposed sensor that if out of position
keeps triggering dives until switched off) but Boeing hid it and self-certified that it was safe. Adding a discrepancy warning
and position indicator for the two independent flight sensors to the cockpit video display is an extra cost feature.
Neither of the planes that crashed had the added safety display. All are cost saving measures. Finally, if a faulty sensor
triggers dives, the pilot at the controls is busy with both hands on the yoke forcing the airplane to stay in the air with stall
and proximity warnings are sounding. The second pilot also must realize what's going on, immediately turn off the electricity
to the screw jack motor and manually turn the stabilizer trim wheel to neutral.
You can't learn this on an iPad. Both pilots should practice it together in a Flight Simulator. If the co-pilot was experienced,
unlike the one in the Ethiopian crash; just maybe, they could have survived the repeated attempts by the airplane to dive into
the ground on takeoff.
The tragedy is that corporate media in pursuit of profits will keep us up to date but will never mention the 6 or 8 minutes
of terror for the 346 souls aboard the two flights. They will cover the criminal negligence trial if there are ever indictments.
But, the news reports never will say that neoliberalism, deregulation, and privatization are the root causes of the deaths.
> if a faulty sensor triggers dives, the pilot at the controls is busy with both hands on the yoke forcing the airplane
to stay in the air with stall and proximity warnings are sounding. The second pilot also must realize what's going on, immediately
turn off the electricity to the screw jack motor and manually turn the stabilizer trim wheel to neutral. You can't learn this
on an iPad. Both pilots should practice it together in a Flight Simulator. If the co-pilot was experienced, unlike the one
in the Ethiopian crash; just maybe, they could have survived the repeated attempts by the airplane to dive into the ground
on takeoff.
That's what I mean by horrid UI/UX. Might as well as both pilots to pat their heads and rub their tummies in synch. And since
the two pilots have to both understand what's going on, we've multiplied the chances for failure.
Boeing also clearly did not know its customers . It should be engineering for the sort of pilots who are going to be hired
by Lion Air, or any rapidly expanding airline in what we used to all the Third World. Hegemony, it seems, makes you insular and
provincial.
Added cost, "mandatory" safety feature. Does not seem to square with the [soon to be former?] CEO's apology-industry written
claim to be committed to absolute safety.
"The FAA, citing lack of funding and resource": I don't suppose I'll survive to see any arm of government not blame
lack of funds for its boneheaded or corrupt incompetence.
But the bigger picture: suppose the FAA is to do its job properly. From where is it going to recruit its staff?
Smaller picture: it doesn't really matter whether the cocked-up MCAS killed all those people or not. Even if it's innocent
of the charge, the account of its development and application is a horror story.
Bigger picture: what other horrors have been hidden by Boeing?
> the account of its development and application is a horror story.
That's how I feel. The tech doc department at Boeing sounds like a horrible place to work; MBAs or their goons telling
you all the time to do stuff you know is wrong. It's not surprising people were willing to talk to the Seattle Times; I bet there
are more people. (Hey, Seattle Times! How about people testing the 737 MAX in simulators (assuming this is done)).
Sounds like the MBAs in Chicago have been busy planting land mines everywhere. Somebody stepped on this one; there are others.
The unfortunate pilots were made test pilots; the unsuspecting passengers: Guinea pigs. Lab rats. And paid for the privilege.
Some others may share this opinion. Change one little thing? Chaos Theory Rules. Same with weather/climate; folks. That rant is
for later.
Boeing stuck with old fashion hydraulic controls in the 737 but faced with an unacceptable flight characteristics of the
larger more efficient engines added a fly-by-wire system to compensate for it.
Interestingly, and maybe relevant to the problem of confusion for the pilots, is that Boeing has had another automatic
trim-modifier operating on its 737s for some time, the speed-trim system (STS):
This system also modifies the stabilizer position during manual flight. Like MCAS, it was brought in to improve stability
under certain flight conditions (the reasons for which are far beyond my knowledge). There is an indication that the pilots on
the flight before the Lion Air crash misinterpreted MCAS actions for STS behavior.
At what point does "crapification" become insufficient to describe Boeing's product and process here? At what point do we have
to speak of " ford-pintofication"?
OK, I'm told to resubmit my crib re: "Boeing options" from the ZeroHedge "tweetstorm" by Trevot Sumner, and include a link
got it:
Economic problem. Boeing sells an option package that includes an extra AoA vane, and an AoA disagree light, which lets
pilots know that this problem was happening. Both 737MAXes that crashed were delivered without this option. No 737MAX with
this option has ever crashed
Ooops! "Options package"? Wait, a "package" that in the interim corrects a potentially catastrophic mfg. defect and airlines
have to pay for it? Whoa, here's your late capitalism in play.
> Boeing sells an option package that includes an extra AoA vane, and an AoA disagree light
This is one of the details I could not get to (and we don't 100% know this is an issue until the forensics are done. Right
now, we have narrative. Truly excellent narrative to be sure -- if only we thought of government the same way as pilots think
of their aircraft! -- but narrative nonetheless).
Let me see if I have this right. Pilots, chime in!
"Authority" is one of the big words in this discussion; MCAS takes authority away from the pilot (and can do in such a drastic
fashion as to crash the plane). Worse, the default case is that it can do so on the basis of a single sensor reading. In a design
appropriate to the consequences for failure (i.e., a different design from that described in the "System Safety Analysis" that
Boeing self-certified) MCAS would take readings from two sensors, and if they disagreed, authority would revert to the pilot
. That's a general principle at Boeing, and so it's reasonable for pilots to assume that they retain authority of MCAS has not
told them they don't have it any more.
Hence, the disagree light, which tells the pilots to take back authority because the sensors are confused. However, I think
there are UI/UX issues with that, given that the 737 cockpit is extremely noisy and pilots have a lot to do on take-off. So a
light might not be the answer. (The light also strikes me as a kludge; first, MCAS feels to me like a kludge, in that we're making
the aircraft flyable only through software.* Fine for fighter jets, which can be inherently unstable, but perhaps not so fine
for commercial aircraft? Then we have a second kludge, a light to tell us that the first kludge has kicked in. I dunno.)
NOTE * However, it's also true that automation affects flight characteristics all the time. So I'm not sure how savage to make
this indictment.
The AOA indication is Service Bulletin 737-31-1650 (there may be others) and is on the both Pilot Flight Displays (PFDs). Pilots
would likely abort a takeoff if they saw the indication come on before getting airborne.
"Boeing has been in the business of aviation safety for more than 100 years, "
How many years ago did Wall Street take over the fortunes of the company? Why did they move their headquarters from their
birthplace of Seattle to Chicago? Why did they start assembling planes in South Carolina and China? Was it to improve aviation
safety? Or, to allow the profiteering parasites to feed off the carcass of the company?
I want to fly on Boeing planes put together by well paid members of the Seattle Machinists Union, not low wage peons. Let's
not even mention the maintenance of American aircraft in China and El Salvador.
President Trump, here's a reelection tip: "Today I am declaring that all American registered aircraft flying in American
airspace must be maintained in the U.S."
> "Today I am declaring that all American registered aircraft flying in American airspace must be maintained in the U.S."
Amazingly, Trump seems to have done OK on this. First, he didn't cave to Muilenberg's (insane, goofy, tone-deaf) request
to keep the 737 flying; then he frames the issue as complexity (correct, IMNSHO), and then he manages to
nominate a Delta CEO as head of the FAA .
And your suggestion is very good one. I wonder if he could do that by executive order? And I wonder how many grey-beards would
come off the golf courses to help out? I bet a lot.
The aircraft is NOT CRAP!!! However. It should have been flown A WHOLE LOT MORE before receiving certification.
*Real* test pilots should have their a–es on the line ; operating for a lot more hours at *the edge of the envelope*, as it
is known. Stability should be by design; not software*patch*. Patch this!
What portion of its' MCAS system flight testing was in computer simulation? Like the so-called Doppler Radar; which *magically*
predicts what the future will bring; while the experts pitch it as fact? And make life-or-death decisions on the theoretical data???
Rush to market; markets rule. We can die.
Agreed, but I think we're seeing signs that a crapification process has begun on the safety side in this industry. (It
has been proceeding for years on the service/amenities side.)
Didn't say it was. The headline reads "Boeing Crapification," not "737 Crapification."
That said, the 737 clearly has issues, as Boeing itself knew, since if they'd had their druthers, they would have launched
a new plane to replace it. See point #2.
> What portion of its' MCAS system flight testing was in computer simulation?
That is a very good question. If I understand the aerodynamics issues aright, MCAS would be most likely to kick in at takeoff,
which raises a host of UI/UX issues because the pilots are very busy at that time. So was MCAS not tested in the simulators? If
so, how on earth was a scenario that included sensor failure not included? It may be that there are more issues with Boeing's
engineering process than the documentation issues raised by the Seattle Times, though those are bad enough.
I say the 737-whatever is a flying Turd, and always has been. It has a bad wing design which means it has to fly nose up compared
to other models( I always remember that when going to the restroom while going somewhere on one). And because of its poor design
it has to takeoff and land at higher speeds. So when flying into someplace like Mexico City it can be quite a harrowing experience,
and the smell of cooking brakes is relatively normal.
Boeing never should have let go of the 757. Now that was a good plane that was simply ahead of its time.
Considering the fact that all these 737s are grounded as no airline trust them to not kill a plane load of passengers and
crew, this is a really big deal. Putting aside the technical and regulatory issues, the fact is that the rest of the world no
longer trusts the US in modern aviation so what we have here is a trust issue which is an even bigger deal.
We now know that the FAA does not audit the work done for these aircraft but the airlines themselves do it. It cannot be just
Boeing but the other aircraft manufacturers as well. Other countries are going to be asking some very hard questions before forking
over their billions to a US aircraft manufacturer in future. Worse is when Ethiopia refused to hand over the black boxes to the
US but gave them instead to a third party.
That was saying that based on how you treated the whole crash, we do not trust you to do the job right and not to change some
of the results. It has been done before, ironically enough by France who the Ethiopians gave the black boxes to. And when you
lose trust, it takes a very long time to gain it back again – if ever. But will the changes be made to do so? I would guess no.
But if the discount foreign airlines had just trained their pilots and paid for the non-crashintothegroundat500mph upgrade,
all of this could have been avoided.
> we have here is a trust issue which is an even bigger deal
Loss or at least wobbliness of imperial hegemony, like. It's not just the aircraft, it's US standards-setting bodies, methods,
"safety culture," even -- dare we say it -- English as the language of aviation. French is no longer the language of diplomacy,
after all, though it had a good run.
Because markets. Neoliberalism puts everything up for sale. Including regulation. Oversimplifying absurdly: And so you
end up with the profit-driven manufacturer buying the regulator, its produce killing people, and the manufacturer canceling its
future profits. That's what the Bearded One would call a contradiction.*
NOTE * There ought to be a way to reframe contradiction in terms of Net Present Value which would not be what we think it is,
under that model.
I wish it were as complete as it should be! There are a ton of horrid details about sensors, the UI/UX for the MCAS system,
737 cockpit design, decisions by the marketing department, and training and maintenance for Asian airlines that I just couldn't
get to. (Although most of those presume that the forensics have already been done.) But I felt that dollying back for the big
picture was important to. Point #1 is important, in that all the factors that drove the 737 decision making are not only still
in place, they're intensifying, so we had better adjust our systems (assuming Boeing remains a going concern -- defenestrating
Muilenberg would be an excellent way to show we accept the seriousness of customer and international concern).
Bloomberg is reporting that : "The Indonesia safety committee report said the plane had had multiple failures on previous flights
and hadn't been properly repaired."
And the day before when the same plane had the problem that killed everyone the next day: "The so-called dead-head pilot on
the earlier flight from Bali to Jakarta told the crew to cut power to the motor driving the nose down, according to the people
familiar, part of a checklist that all pilots are required to memorize."
There's an enormous expansion of air travel in Asia. The lower end -- not flag -- carriers like Lion Air and also Air Asia
are in that business to be cheap ; they're driven by expansion and known to be run by cowboys.
That said, know your customer . I would translate this into an opportunity for Boeing to sell these airlines a service
package for training their ground operations. But it seems that cutting costs is the only thing the MBAs in Chicago understand.
Pilots, pipe up!
Pilot training and requirements are in the hands of the country, not Boeing. If the story that the copilot of the Ethiopian
Airlines plane had only 200 hours of experience that is astounding.
In the US that requirement is 1500 hours. In addition most US airlines would require more than that. And then they slot 'beginning'
pilots for flights in good (better) weather as high minimums pilot.
"sell these airlines a service package" That won't help an airline that is in the business to be cheap. The Indonesia airplane
was repeatedly reported for problems in prior days/flights that was never fixed.
and this quote makes an interesting follow-on to the thread yesterday with 737 Pilot (which Lambert linked to in the first
paragraph here):
"The combination of factors required to bring down a plane in these circumstances suggests other issues may also have occurred
in the Ethiopia crash, said Jeffrey Guzzetti, who also directed accident investigations at FAA and is now a consultant.
"It's simply implausible that this MCAS deficiency by itself can down a modern jetliner with a trained crew," Guzzetti said."
Setting aside Mr Guzzetti's background (dismissing his claim here as tendentious right off the bat would strike me as uncharitable),
and without wishing to exculpate anyone, it does lend some credence to the idea that Ethiopia Airlines may have some contributory
negligence here, staffing the flight with such an inexperienced first officer.
Setting aside Mr Guzzetti's background (dismissing his claim here as tendentious right off the bat would strike me as uncharitable),
and without wishing to exculpate anyone, it does lend some credence to the idea that Ethiopia Airlines may have some contributory
negligence here, staffing the flight with such an inexperienced first officer.
One can often point to inexperience, incompetence, stupidity, incompetence or just bad luck when some disaster happens, but
Boeing counted on perfect performance from flight crews to successfully work with a workaround needed for other workarounds that
needed perfect performance to not catastrophically fail. I know enough about complexity that you cannot depend on perfection because
something will always fail.
Your excellent summary lacks some MCAS details that are not widely reported by the general-audience press.
Like you, I am a retired software engineer, so I have followed an aviation blog discussion of this issue quite closely
since it emerged as a probable software and system design failure. As the blog is open to all, its signal-to-noise ratio is pretty
low, but it seems not too difficult for any technically-minded person to separate the wheat from the chaff. My current understanding,
which I believe others here are in a position to correct, if necessary:
A. The requirement for MCAS apparently emerged very late in the MAX's development, when it became clear that the upper cowling
around the larger engines, being moved up and forward with respect to earlier 737 versions, adds nose-up force as the angle of
attack (AoA) approaches the upper limits of the MAX's operating envelope because at such angles, the cowling itself generates
lift beyond that of the wing.
B. As perceived by a pilot flying manually (not on autopilot), this added nose-up force makes it easier to pull back on the
control column ("stick"), increasing the AoA further. This is like a car running off the asphalt onto a muddy shoulder: the steering
wheel wants to turn the wrong way (toward the ditch) rather than the right way (back on the road).
C. An FAA regulation prohibits certification of an aircraft that presents the pilot with changing stick forces near stall that
nudge the pilot toward the wrong reaction, 14 CFR 25.203(a)
, IIRC (unfortunately, I can't find the original blog citation).
D. MCAS was put in place to satisfy this certification requirement -- not to automagically correct stalls without pilot action.
E. Other means of meeting this requirement exist, ranging from an airframe redesign that avoids the extra nose-up effect of
the larger repositioned engines down to a "stick pusher" that increases the force a pilot would need to pull the stick back further
in this situation.
F. Any of the other options would negate one or both of the MAX's chief selling points: little cost or schedule impact to Boeing
(in a rush to meet the Airbus 320 NEO challenge) and to its customers ("No new flight crew training necessary, because to the
pilot, the MAX feels just like its 737 predecessors.") That is, all the other options introduce new hardware to a completed design
and the more fundamental changes could require new type certification.
G. The easiest fix was pure software: at high indicated AoA, under manual control, and with flaps up, automatically rotate
the horizontal stabilizer a little bit nose-down, which increases the pressure needed to pull the stick back (nose-up). No need
to tell the pilot about this in training or real time, since it's just to make MAX feel like any other 737.
H. The design presented for certification described a single small rotation. Testing showed this was insufficient to provide
the tactile feedback necessary for certification in all cases, so the software fix was obvious: if the trigger conditions still
hold after a 5 sec. pause, do it again.
I. Apparently nobody asked at that point, "What if the AoA indication is stuck high?" We're under schedule and cost pressure,
so who wants to complexify things by (1) adding additional sanity-checking to the aircraft's AoA computations or (2) limiting
how many times we add a little bit of nose-down.
J. When these details combine with a consistently erroneous AoA reading, MCAS can -- if not repeatedly countermanded or disabled
and manually reversed -- eventually rotate the horizontal stabilizer to its maximum nose-down position, where it was found in
both recent incidents, IIRC.
Even if the pilots figure out that's what's happening amid a cacophony of seemingly contradictory instrument readings and warnings
(stick-shaker, trim wheel clacking, alarm chimes, and synthesized voices), the pilots still have to (1) cut power to the electrical
trim systems and (2) restore the required trim, which may then require as many as 50 manual turns of a trim wheel. If you're near
the ground, time is short
A minority of commenting pilots assert that any competently trained cockpit crew should be able to identify MCAS misbehavior
quickly and power off automatic trim per the same checklist that was prescribed for "runaway automatic trim" on every 737 variant,
MAX included. Most seem to agree that with aircraft control difficulties, multiple alarms, and disagreement among the pilot's
and first officer's airspeed and AoA readings almost from the moment of takeoff (not yet officially confirmed), an MCAS-commanded
runaway trim event may feel very different from the runaway trim flavors for which pilots have had simulator training, making
problem identification difficult even given knowledge of the earlier Lion Air incident.
I imagine most software developers and engineers have seen cost/schedule pressures lead to short cuts. If their life was at
stake, I doubt that many would think self-certification that such a project complies with all relevant safety requirements is
a good idea.
Thank you for that. And just 'wow'. I don't really know anything about aircraft/flying but this story is really fascinating
and seems to be true a sign of the times. I guess we'll know what the current 'temperature' is out there when the fallout
(civil liability, criminal liability, plane orders cancelled/ returned, etc) manifests. If Boeing skates, we'll know we've got
a long way to go.
The Post's article on the FAA and Regulatory Capture is incomplete. The process for the FAA (and probably MANY government
agencies) started under Reagan, did not revert to safety under Clinton (make government smaller and all that), and then accelerated
under Bush II in 2005 (not a bi-partisan time). In particular, big changes to the FAA were made in 2005 that were executive in
nature and did not require Congressional approval. CF:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/delegating-aircraft-safety-assessments-to-boeing-is-nothing-new-for-the-faa/
Yes, but. Part of what we are seeing in this case is a rush to judgement based on less than full evidence and analysis, and
so prejudices and ideological positions (which I share actually) are plainly to be seen (and perhaps worth analyzing). "Crapification,"
says the headline.
Yet, I cannot say that I disagree with BA's business decisions as such in a highly competitive environment as regards the tradeoffs
in the development of the MAX and there is a certain absurdity in the idea that Boeing would knowingly take a high reputational
risk, in an industry where failure is front page news (contrast banking or pharma failures).
I have no reason to believe that an FAA fully in charge of all aspects of certification would have prevented these crashes,
as banking and drug regulators have not kept us safe either. What seems worthy of note is that neither the airlines that buy the
product nor the foreign aviation regulators nor pilots' associations do their own testing and certification, in an area where
more redundancy would be good. Nor is there any kind of private third party watchdog testing, like a Moody's or S&P, evaluating
potentially toxic products and services for a price.
Finally, I suppose we have to ask ourselves why the price of the stock is holding up fairly well even as the news flow on these
tragedies is helping the short sellers. Lest we forget that Boeing is the 5th largest defense contractor in the US.
Is engine throttle automated in the flight regime where these accidents occurred? Or are the pilots controlling power? Is the
lag in thrust response interacting with the MCAS in an unanticipated way? Aerodynamic lift of nacelles is mentioned several times;
there is another lift factor relating to the thrust angle; which is not necessarily aligned with the fuselage axis in flight.
Departure procedures often require speed limits and altitude changes; so it is likely multiple power demand levels get set through
takeoff and climb until cruise altitude is reached. Does Autopilot/Flight Director integrate with MCAS; or are they independent
systems? Even without touching flight controls; power changes affect pitch forces. I am wondering if consequences of manual power
changes on an otherwise automated departure were adequately investigated in the certification of the MCAS. Please excuse my ignorance
of these details.
Regulatory elements that have been getting attention include the use of *standard* weights for passengers; IIRC, 170 lbs for
US (and possibly ICAO) passengers comes to mind . Many aircraft accidents have an element of disregard for proper weight distribution,
either accidental, or negligent. For instance: Tail-heavy bad! Intentional loading outside of subsequently approved C.G. and/or
max weight limits is a common, if not ubiquitous part of determining certification limits.There is a safety factor in the certificated
limits; but banking on this; using estimates; is proven risky or disastrous when actual weights, and distribution thereof, is
uncertain. Cargo with false weight values could also occur. One might find incentive to claim lower weights than actual to save
on freight charges. How many 170 lb passengers do you know? I am not familiar with scales being used to check aircraft weight
and balance before takeoff; only calculations; based on formulas and charts.
Scales ARE USED during certain maintenance procedures; for airworthiness certificates; and following certain modifications.
Here is an interesting article by a professional pilot blogger Patrick Smith. He calls the 737, "the Frankenplane", and traces
its history all the way back to the 707 in 1959. According to Smith, "We wonder if the 737 MAX even needed to exist in the first
place. Somewhere deep down, maybe the heart of this whole fiasco is Boeing's determination to keep the 737 line going, variant
after variant, seemingly forever. I'm not saying this is the reason for what happened in Indonesia or Ethiopia, but the whole
737 program just seems misguided and unnecessary. Instead of starting from scratch with a new airframe, they took what was essentially
conceived as a regional jet in the mid-1960s, and have pushed and pushed and pushed the thing -- bigger and bigger engines, fancier
avionics and more seats -- into roles it was never intended for. The "Frankenplane," I call it.
See the article here .
As a pilot myslef, I feel the airlines have a lot to answer for as well. Their constant "dumbing down" of pilots, which comes
from making pilots work long hours for low pay, results in pilots not being the best of the best. And training is a cost to airlines.
Training doesn't result in revenue. Better to have the pilots actually flying, hence Boeing selling this new version of the 737
as not requiring further training. But, training and practice is everything in flying. Flying a plane is actually a relatively
easy skill to acquire. Most people can learn to fly a trainer in 5 hours or so. Most people solo (fly the plane without an instructor)
with only 10-20 hours of instruction. It takes a lot longer to learn how to drive a car for most people (45 hours is the average).
So it really isn't that difficult .until something goes WRONG. That is when the training kicks in. An often quoted flying truism,
is that flying is "99% boredom and 1% stark terror". What happened with these two crashes is that you had some inexperienced pilots
who were not fully trained on the systems (a lot of that blame goes to Boeing). When things start going wrong, information overload
can easily occur if you have not been properly trained, even with two pilots.
Thanks for that correction. We can expect a deluge of blame-the-other-guy PR from the aircraft manufacturer and certification
agencies. Billions are on the line for Boeing if a cascade of judgments it made materially contributed to these crashes. The usual
strategic corporate bankruptcy might follow. I presume Boeing is considered much TBTF by the USG.
Great job summarizing and connecting dots Lambert. I might add one more bullet point though. Items #5 and #6 were aided, abetted
and perhaps somewhat necessitated by 'ye ole NeoLiberal playbook' you spoke of, but more specifically, the current regulatory
FAA/Boeing milieu is attributable to years of budget cuts and strategically applied austerity. The old Grover Norquist, ' not
destroyed, but small and weak enough to be drowned in a shallow bath' saw. Exact same thing we've witnessed with other formally
effective regulators like the EPA, the SEC or the IRS.
I remember having a conversation with an FAA maintenance inspector, an old timer, about ten years ago. He looked to be upwards
of seventy, and he told me he was eight years beyond eligibility for a full retirement. He informed me that a few years back he
was supervising a team of ten people that was now down to two. Their positions had been cut outright or eliminated after they
resigned or transferred when the remaining positions were made miserable by the increased workload and bureaucratic headaches.
The inspector said he had not retired yet because he knew he would not be replaced and he felt the work was important. I asked
him if his department was atypical and he said it was not. Same thing, across the board, with the exception of the executive level
desk jobs in DC and Oklahoma City. Readers can draw their own conclusions but when it comes to funding Federal regulators, I believe
you should never attribute anything to incompetence that you could attribute to malice.
No doubt Neo-Liberal ideologues in high places pushing the corrosive "customer/client" model of regulating along with the requisite
deference and obsequious to industry played a large role as well.
I understand the published materials to boil down to this possible scenario:
To remain competitive and profitable, Boeing needed to improve the fuel efficiency and flight characteristics of a mainstay
medium-haul aircraft. Instead of designing a new aircraft, it modified an existing airframe. Among other changes, it added more
powerful engines, new lift and control surfaces, and enhanced computerized controls.
The modified Max aircraft **did not** fly like the earlier version. That meant Boeing would have to disclose information about
those changes. It would need to train pilots in them, in how to integrate new protocols into existing ones, and in what to do
if the enhanced computer controls malfunctioned, requiring the pilot to regain manual control.
These steps could have increased cost and time to market, might have involved new certifications, and might have reduced sales.
Boeing appears to have relied on enhanced computer flight controls to avoid them.
The newly enhanced computerized controls meant that the computer would do more of the actual flying – the part that was different
from the pre-Max version – and the pilot less. It gave the pilot the virtual – but not real – experience of flying the older aircraft,
obviating the need, in Boeing's judgment, for additional disclosures and training. That worked except when it didn't. (See, driverless
car development.)
One possible failure mode derives from the Max's reliance on a single sensor to detect its angle of attack, the aircraft's
nose-up or nose-down deviation from level flight. Reliance on a single sensor would make it harder to detect and correct a fault.
(Boeing's version of commitment to "absolute" safety.)
In these two crashes, the sensor may have given a faulty reading, indicating that the aircraft's nose was higher than it should
have been for that stage of flight, an attitude that risked a stall. The programmed response was to drop the nose and increase
power. A normal reaction to a real stall, this response can become catastrophic when unexpected or when the pilot cannot correct
it.
In both crashes, it appears that the pilot did attempt to correct the computer's error. Doing so, however, reset the automated
control, leading the computer to reread the faulty sensor to mean "stall." It again dropped the nose and increased speed. The
pilot recorrected the error in what would become a deadly loop, a tug of war that ended in a powered dive into the ground.
What is interesting is what comes next. The FAA was drowned in the bath tub along with the EPA, FDA, SEC, etc. It doesn't have
the money or staff to recertify the 737 Max. An incompetent Administration that is interested only in extracting resources is
in charge. It is clear that Boeing hid the changes to save money and time. Adding a warning indicator that the flight sensors
are not in the correct position to the pilot's display, including it in the preflight checklist, plus flight training would have
prevented the Indonesian crash. But these changes would have raised questions on the adequacy of the new flight critical system
and may have delayed certification overseas. It is easy to overlook problems if your paycheck is at risk. The Boeing managers
who pushed this through deserve jail time for manslaughter.
Canada said it will recertify the 737 Max before it flies in their airspace. China won't recertify the Max until the Trump
Trade War is over. Also, a delay boosts their replacement airliner. If Chicago and DC paper this over like the 2008 Great Recession;
the final nails will have been hammered into the coffin of the hegemon. Trust is gone
The Other Recent Deadly Boeing Crash No One Is Talking About
(nymag.com)
65 Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday March 23, 2019 @01:34PM from the
searching-for-answers dept. New York magazine's Intelligencer remembers last month's
crash of a Boeing 767 carrying cargo for Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service -- and shares a
new theory that its cause wasn't a suicidal pilot or an autopilot malfunction:
In online pilot discussion forums, a third idea has been gaining adherents: that the
pilots succumbed to a phenomenon called somatogravic illusion, in which lateral acceleration
due to engine thrust
creates the sensation that one is tipping backward in one's seat .
The effect is particularly strong when a plane is lightly loaded, as it would be at the
end of a long flight when the fuel tanks are mostly empty, and in conditions of poor
visibility, as Atlas Air 3591 was as it worked its way through bands of bad weather. The idea
is that perhaps one of the pilots accidentally or in response to wind shear set the engines
to full power, and then believed that the plane had become dangerously nose-high and so
pushed forward on the controls.
This would cause a low-g sensation that might have been so disorienting that by the
time the plane came barreling out of the bottom of the clouds there wasn't enough time to
pull out of the dive.
It has been speculated that this might have been the cause of another bizarre and
officially unsolved accident from three years ago: Flydubai Flight 981, which crashed 2016 in
Rostov-on-Don, Russia....
While it's still too early to draw any kind of conclusions about Atlas Air 3591, the
possibility exists that a firm conclusion will never be drawn -- and if it is, the cause
could turn out not to be a design flaw or software malfunction that can be rectified, but a
basic shortcoming in human perception and psychology that cannot be fixed as long as humans
are entrusted with the control of airplanes.
Yes, commercial pilots are taught to "fly their instruments". General aviation pilots may
enjoy more "seat-of-the-pants" flying, but even they are taught to trust instruments over
human perceptions, which are easily fooled, as even simple demos will show.
I used to work for an aircraft instrument maker, and our user interfaces, everything the
pilot interacts with, got more care and attention than the rest of the instrument. Of course
we had to display nothing but totally accurate data, and do so promptly, but we also had to
do so in ways that were obvious and clear, so the pilot can take in the most important
information with a quick glance.
The pilot's standard "scan" is perhaps the most-trained skill. To look at everything on
the instrument panels and outside the windows often enough to not miss anything, yet slow
enough to take in all vital information.
When things get hectic, the pilot still does this scan, interrupting it as needed to
deal with situations, but still doing it. Because, as the saying goes, "trouble often comes
in threes": Stopping everything to handle an initial situation may mask what's really going
on, and lead to a cascade of failures.
With ever more data being aimed at the pilot, there is a distinct risk of information
overload, especially when tired, or during tense but otherwise normal situations, such as
take-off, landing, or flying through turbulence. This overload often encourages the pilot to
rely more on signals from the body, which need less conscious processing, rather than focus
on all that data.
Here, again, is where commercial pilots receive extra training, but perhaps not often
enough. This is one of the factors that keep commercial pilot mandatory retirement ages so
low: The risk of overload increases with age, even when all other factors match those of a
younger person.
Plus, staying in peak training for decades is fatiguing, and relatively few can do so
"naturally". Which is one of the reasons we're running out of commercial aircraft
pilots.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but this overload risk is often handled by adding more
automation, more automatic systems to "help" the pilot. So much so that actually manually
"driving" a commercial aircraft, with hands on the controls, is an increasingly rare part of
a normal flight.
Our instruments also tried to take pilot fatigue into account, saving our brightest and
loudest alarms only for the most desperate situations, to punch-through that overload to help
ensure prompt and correct reactions.
One product I worked on was a TAWS (Terrain Awareness and Warning System) instrument,
which basically stayed quiet unless there was a risk of the pilot flying into the ground, to
help prevent "CFIT" accidents (Controlled Flight Into the Ground). It has special modes for
take-off and landing, though our instrument was designed to actually *avoid* making the pilot
depend on it's display: Useful for information as part of the scan, but not to be used to
navigate the aircraft. Our main function was to provide visual and audible alerts only when
needed.
I believe 100% of US commercial aircraft (and perhaps now even biz-jets) are required to
have TAWS on-board and active. Any TAWS-equipped plane approaching the ground outside of an
approved approach path for a know airport will give the pilot "Terrain ahead. Pull up! Pull
up!" alerts until the hazard no longer exists.
Unfortunately, if a stall is also immanent, the pilot will simultaneously receive an alert
to push the nose down. And increase power. And other things as well. An overload of alerts,
which a skilled and calm pilot will respond to with the most correct action. But which can
overload a stressed or tired pilot, or one with the beginnings of a cold or flu.
The thing is, every alert can be silenced, to reduce the confusion and distractions.
But an overloaded pilot can forget even this simple aid to keeping full awareness and
control.
This is a big part of why pilots are so often blamed for crashes: Because, for whatever
reason, they failed to take the appropriate action demanded by the situation.
As a former aircraft instrument developer, I was always well aware of my instruments'
contribution to the pilot's mental load. Our teams agonized over tiny changes to font
selection and sizes and colors and contrast. And how many button presses were needed to
accomplish a function. And how easy it was to switch modes or silence an alert. Which is why
we had a massive alpha test system that got even the earliest versions of our instruments in
front of pilots with experimental aircraft and ratings. (Experimental aircraft and the pilots
who fly them are rare and precious things to instrument developers, even when we owned and
operated our own corporate test aircraft.)
Fortunately, our efforts paid off, and pilots (and the FAA) loved our instruments. Some of
our design innovations were adopted into instrument regulations by the FAA, so all
manufacturers had to build to our standard. But always hovering over our success was the fear
of news of the crash of a plane flying our instruments. And the fear that information
overload from our instruments would be shown to be a contributing factor.
Which is why part of our required reading was any and all reports (mainly NTSB and NASA)
that even mention pilot overload. Even a decade after leaving that industry, I still read
these reports.
``...the cause could turn out not to be a design flaw or software malfunction that can
be rectified, but a basic shortcoming in human perception and psychology that cannot be
fixed as long as humans are entrusted with the control of airplanes.''
On the other hand, we have two recent examples of what can happen when a flight computer
is given control of the plane and it is unable to avoid doing something stupid like -- as the
old euphemism goes -- `make inadvertent contact with the terrain'.
Until we know more about how this was supposed work and exactly why it
didn't , I think I'll trust the human with his hands on the controls more than the flight
computer.
(Thankfully, the occasions for my needing to fly are few and far between.)
If you look at it and you are headed down (and you have good airspeed), you don't need to
keep trying to nose down - regardless of what your senses are telling you.
What about looking at how the altimeter is changing?
The artificial horizon gives you a lot of information when your sense of direction is
playing tricks on you (in the clouds and feeling like you are going up,down, rolling,
etc.)
The business of Trump giving away something he doesn't own is insane. But insanity has been
the theme of most everything else him and his neocon helpers have been doing of late.
I believe it's time to start paying attention to the truly nutty stories. The crazier
sounding ones ought to get the most attention. After all, who would have conceived the
Trumpies declaring a genuine nobody to be the true President of Venezuela? Early finds:
A US military base on Taiwan. New weapons to Taiwan. More high-level contacts with that
nation. All proposed by the Trumpies. Who benefits most from a small or large war with China?
Headline from the neocon york times:
Israel Is on the Brink of Disaster. Trump Just Made Things Worse.(March 22,
2019)
On Twitter on Thursday, he wrote that "it is time for the United States to fully
recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and
security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!" It is the latest, and
most important, signal from Washington that Mr. Trump is ready to acknowledge Israeli
control of the Golan Heights.
But those signals are also being read by the Israeli right wing as an encouragement to
pursue annexation of territory in the West Bank -- a far more dangerous step that would
present Israel with an unparalleled existential threat to its Jewish and democratic
character.
I'd ask if there is any reason for the murdering and stealing rightwingnut
settlers not to celebrate? Trump has been doing their bidding at every turn, even when
it does direct harm to the US. Are there any indications the Trumpies have something planned
for the subhuman Palestinians. As a matter of fact, YES.
The are much better 'Kushner, boy wonder' articles than this one floating around, but I
want to focus on a single part:
Kushner said in February the White House was poised to unveil the peace plan after
Israel's election in April. While in Warsaw, Kushner said the plan will impact the
entire Middle East region and is "really about establishing border and resolving
final-status issues," according to Sky News Arabia.
Change "final-status" to Final Solution and that would be just about right.
Death-March time, Baby, and to the exultant Republican & End-Timers chant of "they had
their chance, but blew it".
The Trump administration along with Jared Kushner employed in the White House, a lawyer by
the name of Ira Greenstein from Newark, New Jersey, who was by all accounts still acting
as President and/or in the interest of his energy corporation when the U.S. bombed Syria.*
Genie Energy.
An energy corporation operating privately in Syrian territory -- the Israeli-occupied
Golan Heights.
U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration are inherently subjugated by this
paradigm of interests. When commencing with hostile military action against Syria, they
did so while having a direct conflict of interest, primarily related to business ties with
this corporation. This, along with seemingly ulterior political dealings with the Israeli
government, has gone part and parcel to the destabilization of Syria.
While benefiting
Genie Energy, its backers and involved officials.
Officials such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This essentially represents extortion against Syria, as part of a behind-the-scenes
deal between parties, with Greenstein's boss, the founder of Genie Energy and top
Netanyahu donor Howard Jonas having made billions through a telecommunications deal made
possible under the watch of both the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and White
House Office of American Innovation (OAI ) -- for which to benefit said parties for their
actions.
*
The U.S. has since attacked Syria's government a number of times, furthering the
risk of nuclear war or a widened conflict in the Middle East. Ira Greenstein left the
White House on March 30th, 2018 following earlier reporting by this author.
U.S. Navy's USS Porter strikes Syria in April of 2017.
On April
6th, 2017, the U.S. launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syria.
Targeting Shayrat Airbase (FAA LID: OS65), numerous aircraft were
destroyed, primarily Mikoyan Mig-23ML and Sukhoi Su-22M3 models. These
being the same parent models which had been involved in
operations
over Daraa, which is a choke point near the Golan Heights,
it remains as of this posting as being under the control of hostile actors
such as Islamic State (ISIS).*
*
Syria has since made strides in retaking this key area.
On April 14th, 2018, about a year later, this act was repeated with
U.S.-led military strikes against a large number of targets within
Syria -- both France and the U.K. participated in this escalation despite
the associated risks.
Ira Greenstein
Troop deployments
had preceded the airstrikes, with a permanent
presence
with or without ISIS
being
touted
in 2017, setting U.S. involvement in Syria at an ever
increasing rate
. Continued or further involvement in Syria by the Trump
administration or other U.S.-led actors, as shown below in this article, is
illegal.
James Mattis
claimed
at the time that approximately 20% of the Syrian Arab Air Force
(SyAAF) was destroyed; impacting Syria's military capabilities, this would
then continue with further bombings on Syria by the Israeli Air Force.
Israel would find herself
losing
an F-16 this year after Syrian Air Defenses retaliated in
self-defense due to these bombings.
More recently
, activity has included an increasing amount of U.S.
military action against the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) or its pro-government
forces, despite inherent conflicts of interest present within the Trump
administration.
This type of behavior sits in stark contrast to Iran and Russia having
been formally invited by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to participate in
Syria's affairs militarily.
To get to the very heart of the matter, we have to go back to the
presidential transition period, when Newark
lawyer
Ira Greenstein was a member of ex-Congressman John Sweeney's
"Tiger Team."
While he was still Genie Energy's acting President.
This made Greenstein an official presidential transition team member for
the incoming Trump administration, as some may recall, Jared Kushner was a
member
of this team as well.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said that there is a strong possibility that Trump's family
could be indicted by other entities based on the work of Mueller. http:// ow.ly/ZibI30o9PFQ
U.S. out of Iraq. U.S. out of Syria. U.S. out of Afghanistan. U.S. out of South Korea.
U.S. out of Okinawa. U.S. out of Germany. U.S. out of Saudi Arabia. U.S. out of Cameroon.
U.S. out of Djibouti. U.S. out of Qatar. U.S. out of Niger.
Tulsi Gabbard Verified account @ TulsiGabbard Mar 17
For decades, Space has been a model of cooperation between global superpowers. But such
cooperation is the latest victim of the new Cold War. Trump/Neocon efforts to start a space
war/arms race will lead to destruction of our country and planet. #Tulsi2020
Tulsi Gabbard Verified account @ TulsiGabbard Mar 17
For decades, Space has been a model of cooperation between global superpowers. But such
cooperation is the latest victim of the new Cold War. Trump/Neocon efforts to start a space
war/arms race will lead to destruction of our country and planet. #Tulsi2020
As usual, Trump made
the announcement of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation
with any of the relevant administration officials:
President Donald Trump's tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli
territory surprised members of his own Middle East peace team, the State Department, and
Israeli officials.
U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front
and center at next week's meetings between Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential announcement this
week.
No formal U.S. process or executive committees were initiated to review the policy before
Trump's decision, and the diplomats responsible for implementing the policy were left in the
dark.
Even the Israelis, who have advocated for this move for years, were stunned at the timing
of Trump's message.
After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style,
it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone that he makes these decisions without advance warning.
There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably sees no reason
to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do.
Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be responsible for
carrying out his policies and dealing with the international fallout, and that is probably
why so many of his policy decisions end up being exceptionally poor ones. The substance of most
of Trump's foreign policy decisions was never likely to be good, but the lack of an organized
policy process on major decisions makes those decisions even more haphazard and chaotic than
they would otherwise be.
There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims
to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's
fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at shoring up Trump's
support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors.
Whatever short-term benefit Israel gains from it, the U.S. gains nothing and stands to lose
quite a bit in terms of our international standing.
There has been no consideration of the costs and problems this will create for the U.S. in
its relations with other regional states and beyond because Trump couldn't care less about the
long-term effects that his decisions have on the country.
Once again, Trump has put narrow political ambitions and the interests of a foreign
government ahead of the interests of the United States. That seems to be the inevitable result
of electing a narcissist who conducts foreign policy based on which leaders flatter and praise
him.
Trump's bad decision can be traced back to Bolton's visit to Israel earlier this year:
Administration officials said that National Security Advisor John Bolton was instrumental
to the decision, after visiting Israel in January to assure officials there that the United
States would not abandon them in Syria despite Trump's sudden withdrawal of troops from the
battlefield.
Nervous Israeli officials saw an opportunity. "It was an ask," one Israeli source said,
"because of the timing -- it suddenly became a relevant issue about Iran."
Bolton is usually the culprit responsible any destructive and foolish policy decision
over the last year, and his baleful influence continues to grow. We can also see the harmful
effects of the administration's Iran obsession at work. In the end, the Syria "withdrawal"
hasn't happened and apparently isn't going to, but Trump nonetheless gives Israel whatever it
wants in exchange for nothing so that they will be "reassured" of our unthinking
support.
Well, of course Trump puts America last. There is one and only one person he is interested in
-- himself. As you say this is his narcissistic personality at work.
My never ending question is always, "Why does any Republican with a conscience remain
silent? Are they really all this shallow and self absorbed? Is there nothing Trump does that
will finally force them to put country before party and their own ambition?"
It's a really sad state of events that has put this country on the road to ruin.
Trump is making one hell of a mess for the next president to clean up. Straightening out
all this stupidity will take years. Here's hoping that Trump gets to watch his foreign policy
decisions tossed out and reversed from federal prison.
The decision to leave the INF treaty was taken in a similar way and with a total disregard for
the consequences. The leaders of the European NATO countries have shown utter spinelessness in
going along with it.
The administration says that a Russian missile violates the treaty but it will not tell us
what the range of the missile is. Nor will it allow its weapons inspectors to go and look at
it.
The reason is clear: Fear that the weapons inspectors' findings would contradict the
administration's claims.
I voted Republican ever since I started voting. I voted for Bush I, Dole, Dubya, and McCain. I
couldn't vote for either Obama or Romney, but I voted for Trump because of Hillary Clinton.
I am shocked and horrified by what I've seen under Trump. I am deeply disappointed that
so few Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) have stood up to him on foreign policy, and
I will never vote Republican again. This GOP/Israel connection stinks to high heaven. Anyone
who studied or remembers our problem with Communist spies back in the '50s has got to be
hearing alarm bells ringing in their ears. Worries about Soviet spying and Russian meddling
pale in comparison to what's now going on in plain sight with Israel.
To be fair, it ain't just Team R that has the sloppy crush on Israel. Team D is just as bad,
even if they don't gush quite so publicly. In fact, episodes such as this one are useful in a
way, as they make it hard to pretend that this is just a one-off, a misguided decision that we
have to go along with to appease a powerful friend.
Europoliticians tell that last one a lot. "We really don't want to but the Americans twisted
our arms ZOMG Special Relationship so sorry ZOMG!" Only with a lot more Eurobureaucratese.
I agree with the article's premise, but not because of this move regarding Israel.
Personally, I believe this move will have little impact on the outcome of the crisis in the
Middle East. Saudi Arabia and the other Arab monarchies are too focused on containing Iran and
Turkey to give a crap about what Israel does. The only Arab states that I can see objecting to
this move are Syria (obviously) and the others who were already allied with Iran and/or Turkey
to begin with.
Right now, the REAL center of attention in the region should be Northern Syria. THAT's where
the next major war likely will begin. In that area, Saudi Arabia and to a lesser extent Turkey
and the United Arab Emirates are the ones doing the major escalations, while Israel has
virtually no role at all aside from sideline cheer-leading. And of course, Trump is doing
nothing to stop what could become the next July Crisis. What's "America First" about that?
Nevertheless, Israel should be very concerned about Northern Syria. If war breaks out and
the US is forced to go to war with its own NATO ally as a result, Israel should prepare to kiss
its alliance with the US goodbye.
There is no way our international reputation will come out of this war unscathed, and odds
are we'll be in a far worse position diplomatically than we were at any point in our history,
even during the Iraq war. When that happens, the American people will be out to assign blame.
Many (rightfully or not) will blame Israel due to its connections to neoconservatism and
Saudi jingoism, and consequently we may end up seeing BOTH parties becoming unfriendly to
Israel over the subsequent generation.
All of this could be prevented if President Trump would just tell Saudi Arabia to STOP
the nonsense. But no. He's too focused on MIC profits. He's not America First. And quite
frankly, I'm starting to think Benjamin Netanyahu is not Israel-first either, because if he
were he'd be warning Trump about the mess he's going to end up getting America, Israel, and
much of Europe and the Middle East into.
"So you ask what I will change? I will change our priorities so we stop wasting trillions
of our dollars on wasteful counterproductive wars and dedicate them to taking care of the
urgent needs of our communities across this country." #ServiceBeforeSelf#PeaceDvidend
Tulsi Gabbard 7:44 AM - 20 Mar 2019
"I'm not running for president to BE president. I'm running for president to be able to
bring about this sea change in our foreign policy that is so necessary for us and for the
world, and I'm most qualified to do that." #ServiceBeforeSelf#Tulsi2020pic.twitter.com/wk2M7O0CgR
The Trump administration has
ignored yet another mandated deadline for reporting to Congress on Yemen:
A senior Pentagon official had pledged to deliver the strategy report at the beginning of
March after failing to meet a Feb. 1 deadline mandated by law.
In recent months, the Trump administration has disregarded several certification
requirements from Congress. In February, the State Department refused to say whether the
Saudi-led force had reduced civilian casualties in the Yemeni conflict. And the White House
failed to respond to lawmakers' query about whether Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
was responsible for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Last year, the administration met the first certification deadline by brazenly lying to
Congress that the Saudi coalition was successfully reducing harm to civilians in Yemen.
Congress completely failed to hold Secretary Pompeo accountable for those lies, and the
administration has obviously concluded that it can get away with disregarding these
requirements. For the last several months, both the Secretary of State and the Pentagon have
simply refused to comply with the law. In this case, the Pentagon probably can't "detail
specific US diplomatic and national security objectives" because the only discernible objective
of reflexive support for the Saudis and Emiratis in Yemen is to indulge them in whatever they
want to do. An administration that has illegally involved the U.S. in the war on Yemen for more
than two years obviously won't have any respect for legal requirements set by Congress when
they can't even be bothered to respect the Constitution.
The administration's contempt for the law and their disrespect for Congress are additional
reasons why the House should vote on and pass the antiwar Yemen resolution that the Senate
passed earlier this month. Beyond that, Congress needs to increase pressure on the Saudi and
Emirati governments with additional measures to cut off arms sales and hearings to scrutinize
the numerous human rights abuses and war crimes committed by their forces and their
proxies.
When war supporters object that Congress risks undermining the U.S.-Saudi relationship, it
is important for members of Congress to know that it is Mohammed bin Salman who has jeopardized
the relationship through his reckless and destructive behavior. The Saudi government has been
desperately lying about its conduct in Yemen and elsewhere to the U.S. and the entire world,
and the crown prince has proven himself to be completely unreliable and strikingly incompetent
at everything except grabbing more power for himself:
"We know who this guy is, we know what he's capable of, and treating him like he's an ally
or a reliable partner is totally untenable," said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former US Agency for
International Development director during the Obama administration.
The Saudi government has made itself a liability to the U.S. Since the administration puts
Saudi Arabia first and won't do anything to defend American interests, it falls to Congress to
do what the president won't.
As usual, Trump
made the announcement
of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials...
President Donald Trump's tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory surprised members of his own
Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials.
U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front and center at next week's meetings
between Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential
announcement this week.
No formal U.S. process or executive committees were initiated to review the policy before Trump's decision, and the diplomats
responsible for implementing the policy were left in the dark.
Even the Israelis, who have advocated for this move for years, were stunned at the timing of Trump's message.
After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style, it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone
that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably
sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do. Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be
responsible for carrying out his policies and dealing with the international fallout, and that is probably why so many of his policy
decisions end up being exceptionally poor ones. The substance of most of Trump's foreign policy decisions was never likely to be
good, but the lack of an organized policy process on major decisions makes those decisions even more haphazard and chaotic than they
would otherwise be.
There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical
political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at
shoring up Trump's support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors.
The three-day visit to Washington by the president of Brazil brought together two of the
most right-wing figures in the world: Jair Bolsonaro, a former military officer and fervent
admirer of the blood-soaked military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, and
Donald Trump, who has become the pole of attraction for authoritarians and fascists the world
over, including the gunman who slaughtered 50 Muslims at two New Zealand mosques last week.
During their joint press conference at the White House Tuesday afternoon, Trump repeated his
declaration, delivered to an audience of right-wing Cuban and Venezuelan exiles in Florida,
that "The twilight hour of socialism has arrived in our hemisphere." He emphasized, as he did
in his State of the Union speech, that this also involved putting an end to the threat of
socialism within the United States itself.
Both Trump and Bolsonaro have made the extirpation of socialism -- the political core of
fascist movements -- the central goal of their governments. At their joint press conference,
they railed against socialism only days after the massacre in New Zealand, carried out by
Brenton Tarrant. Tarrant posted a manifesto hailing Trump as a "symbol of renewed white
identity" and declaring his desire to put his boot on the neck of every "Marxist."
The mutual embrace of Trump and Bolsonaro at the White House is symbolic of the elevation of
far-right parties and cultivation of fascistic forces by capitalist governments and established
bourgeois parties all over the world. It underscores the fact that the growth of fascism in
Europe, Asia, Latin America and the US is the result not of a groundswell of mass support from
below, but rather the sponsorship and encouragement of so-called "democratic" governments that
are, in fact, controlled top to bottom by corporate oligarchs.
The global promotion of extreme right politics was embodied by the presence of right-wing
ideologue Steve Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs vice president and Navy officer, as a guest of
honor at a dinner with Jair Bolsonaro Monday night. Bannon has close ties with Bolsonaro's son,
Eduardo, who is a member of the Brazilian Parliament and a Latin American representative of the
political consortium set up by Bannon, known as the Movement, whose aim is to promote extreme
right-wing political parties throughout the world. "Some of the Bolsonaro team on the right see
themselves as disciples of the Bannon movement and representatives of Bannon for Brazil and
Latin America," one former Trump administration official told McClatchy.
At the press conference, both Jair Bolsonaro and Trump pledged their support to a fascistic
litany of "god, family and nation," as Trump put it. Bolsonaro declared, "Brazil and the United
States stand side-by-side in their efforts to share liberties and respect to traditional and
family lifestyles, respect to God, our creator, against the gender ideology of the politically
correct attitudes, and fake news."
Both presidents threatened the use of military force against Venezuela, demonizing President
Nicolas Maduro as a socialist dictator. (He heads a capitalist regime, but one whose foreign
policy tilts toward China and Russia rather than US imperialism).
Trump reiterated the mantra that "all options are on the table" against Venezuela. Bolsonaro
was asked if he would permit US soldiers to use Brazilian soil as a base for military
operations against Venezuela. Rather than dismissing that prospect as a violation of both
Brazilian and Venezuelan sovereignty, he declined to answer, citing the need for maintaining
operational secrecy and the element of surprise.
One of the bilateral agreements that Trump and Bolsonaro signed would allow the United
States to use Brazil's Alcantara Aerospace Launch Base for its satellites. Brazil also
announced an end to visa requirements for US visitors...
Before visiting the White House, Bolsonaro made an unannounced visit to the headquarters
of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, an extraordinary move for the
president of a country that was subjected to 21 years of unrestrained torture and murder by a
military dictatorship installed in a CIA-backed coup.
The dire implications for the working class of the global rise of the far right are
indicated by Bolsonaro's glorification of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Trump hailed the
"shared values" between his government and that of a former military officer who praises a
regime that jailed, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of workers and students. Twenty
years ago, Bolsonaro told an interviewer that the Brazilian Congress should be shut down and
that the country could be changed only by a civil war that completed "the job that the military
regime didn't do, killing 30,000 people."
The capitalist ruling classes are turning once again to dictatorship and fascism in response
to the intensification of the world economic crisis, the disintegration of the postwar
international order and growth of trade war and geostrategic conflicts, and, above all, the
resurgence of the class struggle on a world scale...
"... The White House didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. But in another stand-off with House Democrats, Cipollone on Thursday rejected a request renewed last week from Cummings and two other committee chairmen for information on Trump's communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... Cummings said the committee obtained a document that "appears" to show that McFarland conducted official business on her personal email account. He said the document was related to efforts by McFarland and other White House officials to transfer sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia "in coordination with Tom Barrack, a personal friend of President Trump and the chairman of President Trump's inaugural committee." ..."
"... Regarding Trump's communications with Putin, Cummings, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff and Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel say they are examining the substance of in-person meetings and phone calls, the effects on foreign policy, and whether anyone has sought to conceal those communications. ..."
"... The Constitution gives the executive branch exclusive power to conduct foreign relations, Cipollone said. "Congress cannot require the president to disclose confidential communications with foreign leaders." ..."
A key House Democrat is renewing demands that the White House turn over documents about the use of private texts or emails by
Jared Kushner, saying Kushner's lawyer acknowledged that the senior aide used the non-secure WhatsApp application to communicate
with foreign leaders.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings said in a letter sent Thursday to White House Counsel
Pat Cipollone that the administration has failed to produce documents tied to Kushner and other officials despite requests from the
committee since 2017. Cummings also sought a briefing on how the official messages are being preserved.
... ... ...
The White House didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. But in another stand-off with House Democrats, Cipollone on
Thursday rejected a request renewed last week from Cummings and two other committee chairmen for information on Trump's communications
with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
WhatsApp
Cummings, to underscore his concern about whether unsecured White House communications have included classified information, said
in his letter that Lowell acknowledged during the December meeting that Kushner had used WhatsApp to communicate with foreign leaders.
Kushner is a senior White House adviser and the son-in-law of President
Donald Trump , overseeing the administration's Middle
East policies among other issues. Cummings said he and then-Oversight Chairman
Trey Gowdy , a Republican who has since retired from Congress,
met with Lowell in December.
Cummings's letter said Lowell said that Kushner has been in compliance with the law, and that he takes "screenshots" of communications
on his private WhatsApp account and forwards them to his official White House email account or to the National Security Council.
Cummings wrote that when asked whether Kushner ever used WhatsApp to discuss classified information, Lowell replied, "That's above
my pay grade."
The focus on Kushner and others follows the earlier investigations by the Justice Department and Republican-controlled congressional
committees of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server when she served as secretary of state during the Obama administration.
'Alternative Means'
In Thursday's letter, Cummings said the White House's refusal to turn over documents is "obstructing the committee's investigation
into allegations of violations of federal records laws" and potential breaches of national security. He demanded that the White House
say by March 28 whether it intends to comply voluntarily with the renewed requests.
"If you continue to withhold these documents from the committee, we will be forced to consider alternative means to obtain compliance,"
Cummings said.
... ... ....
K.T. McFarland
Cummings also wrote that his committee has obtained new information about other White House officials that raises additional security
and federal records concerns about the use of private email and messaging applications.
His letter said others may have been involved in the practice while they worked at the White House, including former deputy national
security adviser K.T. McFarland and former chief strategist
Steve Bannon.
Cummings said the committee obtained a document that "appears" to show that McFarland conducted official business on her personal
email account. He said the document was related to efforts by McFarland and other White House officials to transfer sensitive U.S.
nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia "in coordination with Tom Barrack, a personal friend of President Trump and the chairman of President
Trump's inaugural committee."
The chairman said another document appeared to show that Bannon received documents "pitching the plan from Mr. Barrack through
his personal email account," at a time Bannon was at the White House and working on broader Middle East policy.
Regarding Trump's communications with Putin, Cummings, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff and Foreign Affairs Chairman
Eliot Engel say they are examining the substance of in-person meetings and phone calls, the effects on foreign policy, and whether
anyone has sought to conceal those communications.
In a written response Thursday, Cipollone wrote, "While we respectfully seek to accommodate appropriate oversight requests, we
are unaware of any precedent supporting such sweeping requests."
The Constitution gives the executive branch exclusive power to conduct foreign relations, Cipollone said. "Congress cannot require
the president to disclose confidential communications with foreign leaders."
In a joint statement on Thursday night, Cummings, Engel and Schiff said that the Obama administration had "produced records describing
the president and secretary of state's calls with foreign leaders." The congressmen added that "President Trump's decision to break
with this precedent raises the question of what he has to hide."
( Updates with statement from Cummings, Schiff and Engel, in final paragraph.
)
The people who died in last Sunday's plane crash were not just killed by Boeing. Their deaths stemmed from an ideology that puts
business interests above human life.
... ... ...
Boeing is not just a lobbying juggernaut that donates prodigiously to politicians all over the country; it's also a company in
which numerous
members
of Congress
are personally invested, and it cultivates
mutually
beneficial
financial relationships with
top
officials
. Meanwhile, as William McGee of Consumer Reports
told
Amy Goodman
, these issues are rooted in the FAA's lax, business-friendly oversight of the very industry it's meant to
regulate, a case of
regulatory
capture
that stretches back long before this administration.
Whatever the black box from the Ethiopian Airlines flight reveals, the lives put at risk by
lax
regulations
are not apolitical tragedies; they are caused by an administration that time and again has shown itself to be
callous and indifferent to the lives of the people it claims to fight for, whether Puerto Ricans left to
fend
for themselves
in the wake of natural disaster, or federal workers used as
bargaining
chips
in a game of political brinkmanship.
But more than that, they are victims of an ideology that tells us the greatest insult to human life is not the death and misery
that comes from unchecked greed, but efforts to democratically control it through public institutions. The real problems aren't
unsafe products, pollution, dangerous chemicals, and the like, we're told, but "red tape" and the taxes used to fund the bodies
regulating them. Meanwhile, activists like Nader have long been
painted
as
"
wacky
"
extremists in the pursuit of some quixotic ideological crusade simply for trying to do things like prevent people from
dying
in cars without seat belts
.
When social-democratic policies are enacted, wealthy people take less home after taxes, and businesses are inconvenienced by
regulations meant to secure the common good. But when neoliberal policies are put in place, people and their families go hungry,
they lose their homes, they get injured on the job, they get sick, and, sometimes, they die. The public should be enraged by the
actions of governments like Trump's and Trudeau's; but we should also be angry at a political narrative that tells us trying to
stop such tragedies is "ideological" instead of common sense. We owe it to the crash victims to create no more of them.
On May 12, 2010, the New York Times ran an article by economics editor Catherine Rampell
titled "The New Poor: In Job Market Shift, Some Workers Are Left Behind"that focused on the
largely middle-aged unemployed who will probably never work again. For example, 52 year old
administrative assistant Cynthia Norton has been working part-time at Walmart while sending
resumes everywhere but nobody gets back to her. She is part of a much bigger picture:
Ms. Norton is one of 1.7 million Americans who were employed in clerical and
administrative positions when the recession began, but were no longer working in that
occupation by the end of last year. There have also been outsize job losses in other
occupation categories that seem unlikely to be revived during the economic recovery. The
number of printing machine operators, for example, was nearly halved from the fourth quarter
of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009. The number of people employed as travel agents fell by
40 percent.
But Ms. Rampell finds the silver lining in this dark cloud:
This "creative destruction" in the job market can benefit the economy.
Pruning relatively less-efficient employees like clerks and travel agents, whose work can be
done more cheaply by computers or workers abroad, makes American businesses more efficient.
Year over year, productivity growth was at its highest level in over 50 years last quarter,
pushing corporate profits to record highs and helping the economy grow.
The term "creative destruction" might ring a bell. It was coined by Werner Sombart in his
1913 book "War and Capitalism". When he was young, Sombart considered himself a Marxist. His
notion of creative destruction was obviously drawn from Karl Marx, who, according to some, saw
capitalism in terms of the business cycle. With busts following booms, like night follows day,
a new round of capital accumulation can begin. This interpretation is particularly associated
with Volume Two of Capital that examines this process in great detail. Looking at this
material, some Marxists like Eduard Bernstein drew the conclusion that capitalism is an
infinitely self-sustaining system.
By 1913, Sombart had dumped the Marxist commitment to social revolution but still retained
the idea that there was a basis in Karl Marx for upholding the need for "creative destruction",
a view buttressed by an overly positive interpretation of
a
