they're passengers on a 737 Max headed into a mountain.

He/they will do anything it takes to placate big donors, stay in power, you name it.

I also recall during the shrubs tenure, he gutted whistleblower protection within the FAA.

I remember on both occasions thinking that this will not end well.

The airlines were also financially deregulated. The Airline Deregulation Act was passed in 1978, during the Carter administration. It was intended to keep national commercial air travel competitive by prohibiting states from regulating airlines' prices, routes or services.

During Reagan's (occupation) of the White House......HW Bush and his cronies committed Treason to put Reagan in there.
HW and all his cronies were running the nation, not Ronnie. They were wiping out all regulations and organizations that stood in their way of getting back to the "GILDED AGE"...... They were the ones who began the PNAC in 1997, twenty years before 1997.......

I send her stories. She'll want this.

to promote both aviation safety and the airline industry. But after the ValuJet crash in 1996, the FAA took heat for allowing cost-cutting to jeopardize safety, and the Federal Aviation Act was amended to remove the dual mandate and instead make safety FAA's sole focus. Trump effectively undid that change, and now we're paying for it. You can't let any industry regulate itself; inevitably profits will become more important than anything else. I thought that lesson was learned almost 30 years ago but apparently not. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/flyingcheap/etc/cronfaa.html

First day stuff, Biden style.

Although I suspect all we’d hear is why it’s Biden’s fault

nt

We already finished my Indivisible group’s Call to Action email for the coming week, but this’ll give me a head start on the next one!

...while elevating death rates is another jolly for His Royal Anus.

I doubt he even knew what he was signing.

Rec

Rec

I was aware of general reductions in FAA oversight for aviation and commercial space launch (as well as loosening of DoD oversight of space launch safety on Air/Space Force ranges). But the referenced articles lay it out really well for the aircraft part.

SpaceX (Muscovite) has been flouting Range Safety requirements at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg SFB since they started launching. DoD has not been using much of its teeth to get SpaceX back in line because the government wants to promote commercial space. Since Musk is one of these give-them-an-inch-and-they'll-take-a-mile guys, this slight backing off by DoD has resulted in SpaceX pretty much doing whatever they want.

Rarely mentioned in all this is the fact that Boeing moved their HQ from Chicago to Washington, D.C. (Arlington, VA) last year, right next to the Pentagon. All they want is defense business because of the bottomless pit of DoD money that congress shovels their way.

My hypothesis (uneducated guess): In letting their aircraft operation turn to shit, and quietly relocating their HQ to the Pentagon's front lawn, Boeing is gradually making moves that will see it divesting itself of commercial aircraft altogether and will become a pure defense contractor. Boeing is ceding global commercial aircraft manufacturing leadership to Airbus.

I don't know of a US entity rich enough to buy Boeing's commercial aircraft division, and I don't think the government will allow any foreign ownership of Boeing's commercial airplane division. But something big is afoot, methinks.

It makes sense Boeing wants to leave the commercial aviation market and get unlimited money from the government with defense contracts.

to take to the floor for a vote. It's been going on for a long time. A lot of corporations are self regulating already to a point. There are many infractions or failures that companies are required to write up to explain what happened, provide lessons learned and what they will do to resolve them themselves before a federal regulatory entity ever gets wind of it, if ever. Especially corporations that do contract work for the government.

I have a friend that works for a subcontractor that goes through and makes sure defense department subcontractors are upholding their end of whatever subcontract they have with the government and if he finds an issue he sends it up the chain in his company and those above him determine if the violation needs to be immediately submitted to another larger company that is subcontracting for the government and has several smaller companies like his subcontracted to do the certain kind of work his company specializes in. or if the subcontractor in question can supply reasoning for what appears to be a contract violation and if they can't what they are going to do to fix it in order to satisfy the terms of the original contract. The issue could be with the company in question or with companies it may be subcontracting with and those companies could even be subcontracting with other companies as well.

For a long time the FAA and NTSB have had a similar procedure for when a company finds defective part in the field by a mechanic/technician who a lot of times is working for a subcontractor of the owners of the aircraft (many of the airlines don't "own" the aircraft, they lease them like you would a car) be it the airline or the company leasing the plane will be notified. Whichever or if both are notified, depending on contract rules and federal regulations if its of a high enough severity level in their subcontract then either the aircraft builder (i.e. Boeing, Airbus etc) or the subcontractor who built that specific or group of parts for the builder, or the NTSB/FAA, like I said depending on the reporting requirements of the severity of the defect of the part is notified.

At some point every defect makes its way to the NTSB/FAA but it could be a year or two if the defect was determined in the myriad of contracts not to be of a severity level high enough and/or a "proper" fix was put into place to eventually show the NTSB/FAA it was resolved. One break in this huge bureaucratic chain and you get a space in a fuselage "plugged up" where a door once went on an aircraft being ridiculously stretched to its limits for profit blows out. Spirit Aero Systems (whom Boeing spun off their production line) who build the fuselage for the MAX not having any paper work AT ALL showing that the bolts holding that door plug in were inserted is , well, just fucking nuts. What's even more nuts is the interviews I've seen with the NTSB/FAA say it was a failure of redundant testing and inspection, not that the people responsible for putting those bolts in the first place had to WRITE IT DOWN SOMEWHERE! That's 2 or 3 levels of fuck ups on one thing That's a lot.

Anyway, depending on severity level of a defect, if the responsible party at the top, which could be any level once again depending on severity levels and rules usually set forth by the FAA /NTSB(back to square one where corporations usually write the rules and regulations)
the part or system is either repaired replaced, whatever it takes to satisfy the next level up the chain, job done.

This may not be 100% correct but, from my experience of knowing someone who owns a small machine shop that is subcontracted to make a few different widgets originally for Boeing but now subcontracting for another company subcontracting for Spirit Aero, some of the shit hes told me, and many many years working under federal guidelines for every kind of radiology equipment from manufactures to what the Radiologists use, and how hard it is for a small company to get a new idea approved as a medical device and how easy it is for a huge corp to get approval to sell some really shitty stuff it's fucking crazy. The fact anything works with this many humans touching shit is a fucking miracle to me. Especially when the big corps. hire K street to write the shit (not just rules either, but laws) they want and get it inserted directly into our rule and law making processes without the American people even knowing it because its buried so deep in all of that other bureaucratic shit.

Makes me dizzy

Be regulated!

This is their wet dream. They don't want any government regulations on businesses.

"President Trump has been trying to undo even that modest progress. His administration last year authorized faster “line speeds” (the number of animals killed per minute) for poultry plants, and began looking into doing the same for beef. New U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulations that take effect in December will allow the same at pork plants, while also cutting 40 percent of government inspectors and delegating inspections to employees, who may not have undergone any kind of training in food safety."

https://newrepublic.com/article/155363/trump-meatpacking-processing-plant-rules-upton-sinclair-jungle

I rarely buy beef or chicken that is processed by big corporations like Tyson!

It was caused by the pilots not reducing power after they took off. If they would have backed out of the gas when they were supposed to, they wouldn’t have driven a perfectly good airplane into the ground.

and they started to get stick shake with MCAS trimming the aircraft down the pilots initial reaction was to apply power and push forward as instruments were falsely indicating a stall condition and he was doing what you do to correct a stall. As they did that MCAS continued trimming the plane to a nose down attitude. In the cockpit voice recorders the young first officer can be heard telling the captain to kill the MCAS system, which they finally did. That stopped the continous pitch down from the stabilizer trim tabs from increasing anymore and bought them a few precious seconds to try and correct what was going on. The voice and data recorders showed they both were trying to spin the trim wheels backwards to alleviate the nose down attitude and ever increasing speed. They both could be heard trying to pull back on the yoke at the same time but the trim tabs had been set so far in a pitch down condition by the MCAS system, the yoke itself was unable to overcome the nose down attitude of the aircraft. The Captain can be heard saying its not enough (pulling on the yolk) so as a last resort they re-engaged the MCAS system hoping it would help them trim out the aircraft, but it was the killer and put them back to square one as it resumed its pitching the aircraft downward until it hit. Velocity actually contributed to the fate of their situation.

Boeing, the owners of those aircraft were responsible in both incidents involving the new MCAS system, the NTSB/FAA in 1, and it was all to save money and the foolish trust by the regulator that the owners and manufacturers found a way to satisfactorily remedy the issue.

Greed combined with the companies ability to have undo pressure on the regulators by rules and laws they get to write for themselves as I wrote in my post above, was the cause of those accidents straight up.

A fairly detailed discussion of the cause of the Ethiopian Airline accident, and an absolute flagrant under the breath attempt by Boeing to blame those pilots because they were African and didn't know what they were doing, is in the Frontline special on Boeing and the MAX that just re-aired this weekend. Feel free if you haven't.....

Edit: Simply bringing the power back to even idle would not have stopped that suicide software.