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The Boeing scandal is an indictment of Trump's corporate America
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/07/boeing-737-max-regulation-corporate-americaThe Boeing scandal is an indictment of Trump’s corporate America
Will Hutton
Sun 7 Apr 2019 08.59 BST
America First nationalism, indulgent free market economics, Republican libertarianism and a political system in hock to corporate lobbying has just contributed to killing 356 innocent people. The more we know about the crashes of Boeing 737 Max 8 planes in Indonesia and Ethiopia – after anti-stalling devices locked both aircraft into unrecoverable nose-dives – the more shocking the story becomes.
(snip)
The story begins in 2011. Europe’s new Airbus 320neo, with its superb fuel efficiency and low operating costs, had picked up 667 orders at the Paris air show, a record for a commercial aircraft. Worse, American Airlines had done the unthinkable: it had ordered 130 of the new Airbus and 130 of the older one. Boeing’s relationship with American was foundational: it could always rely on the airline for its bedrock business, an insider, all-American affair. Now American had dared to buy European in unprecedented volumes: it was a competitive necessity to match rival airlines. Boeing had to respond. But instead of developing a whole new plane that could carry heavier, fuel-efficient engines, it made the fateful decision to bolt them on to a variant of its 737 series. Since the days of Orville and Wilbur Wright, the key to safe flying has been to organise the pitch of the plane so that its aerodynamics work to prevent stalling, a complex interrelationship between the angle and shape of wings, the distribution of weight and the power of the engines. If you intend to use a heavier, more fuel-efficient engine, it will throw everything out of kilter. Essentially, you have to design a new plane.
Boeing’s initial and correct reaction had been to commit to just that, but the process is enormously expensive and takes up to 10 years. The company had to react faster and keep its share price up, so the Max 8 was born, going into service in 2017. The technical problem was obvious. With heavier engines, the pitch of a plane with wholly different dynamics could be disturbed in some flying conditions. Hence the sensor in the front of the plane that would recognise changes in pitch and automatically adjust the wings to keep the plane stable, not in principle a bad idea, but one that requires hyper-reliability and a way for pilots to override the system when necessary.
In the world of aerospace, such judgment calls should have required an entire recertification process and verification by a third party. That did not happen. For decades, regulation in the US has been hamstrung by the libertarian charge that government is inefficient and always wrong, taxes are a coercive infringement of individual liberty, and regulation inhibits private sector dynamism. The Federal Aviation Authority has an enviable technical reputation, but over the past decade it has suffered from successive budget cuts and government shutdowns as the Republican party has waged war on federal spending and federal agencies. Donald Trump, before the crashes, said he wanted to privatise the agency and scale it back even more.
In order to function at all, the FAA has had to delegate regulation to airlines and manufacturers – the fox looking after the chicken coop. Essentially, Boeing decided that the Max 8 did not need recertification and this decision was not challenged by the FAA. Moreover, Boeing undertook much of the safety work itself without any independent review, although as yet the outside world does not know to what degree. What we do know is that 1,000 Boeing employees are seconded to the FAA. Boeing then decided to market the Max 8 as part of the 737 family rather than as a plane with wholly different flight characteristics and a new automated software system that, crucially, did not allow pilots to override in an emergency using standard, practised techniques. Instead, they would need special training, which was not offered or provided.
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17 replies
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But other than that it is a wonderful airplane! 
It needs to go straight to the scrapyard.
for multiple right-wing Congressional budget cuts and the FAA being a willing accomplice for passing the certification process off to manufacturers.
We need not only to be wary of the quality of new aircraft, but also the regular maintenance standards that could be made more lax, which affects all aircraft - old and new.
And, if Republicans get away with privatizing the FAA, I don't ever want to travel by air again. We might also make note that most all plutocrats and many of our top politicians travel only by private jet......
The public needs to be made totally aware of how this failure came about.....
Kicking for visibility. To me, the important part of this discussion is about corporate America and their undue influence and control of our government. That topic could use a thread all its own. I know that the subject comes up each day, but I don't think it can be emphasized often enough. I agree with the poster upthread who said that this all started with Ronnie Raygun (pun intended). Agolf Twitler is just a continuing symptom of the problems in our country. However, I know that tRump will never be on the side of solving any of them, rather he and his ilk will do everything possible to make them worse. Kudos for posting this thread.