BOEING IS ONLY
ONE MORE EXAMPLE OF HOW UTTERLY CORRUPT OUR STINKING GOVERNMENT IS! THERE IS
PROBABLY NOT ONE MEMBER OF CONGRESS THAT HAS NOT SUCKED OFF BRIBES HANDED OUT
BY BOEING!
It is worth noting that the $60 billion figure equals what
Boeing requested from the government last week. In a statement, the firm said
it “supports a minimum of $60 billion… for the aerospace manufacturing
industry.” Boeing would receive the lion’s share of any such bailout.
House report on Boeing 737 Max crashes:
Corporate criminality, FAA complicity, but no accountability
17 September 2020
On Wednesday, the Democratic majority on
the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released the results of
its 18-month investigation into the two crashes of Boeing 737 Max airplanes
that killed a combined total of 346 passengers and crew.
The 238-page report provides damning
evidence that Boeing knowingly risked the lives of countless thousands of
people by rushing into service an aircraft it knew to have potentially fatal
design flaws. It systematically concealed the dangers from government
regulators, airline customers, pilots and the general public.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), even when it
became of aware of the safety risks of the new plane, certified the 737 Max and
failed to alert either airline workers or passengers of the dangers.
The result was the horrific crash of
Lion Air flight 610 some 13 minutes after takeoff from Jakarta on October 29,
2018, killing all 189 people on board. Even after this disaster, in which a
malfunction repeatedly forced down the nose of the plane until it crashed into
the Java Sea, Boeing and the FAA kept the 737 Max in the air and failed to
address the automated flight control defect that caused the crash.
This led less than five months later to
the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, on March 10, 2019. That disaster
followed the same pattern and ended with the plane plowing into the ground and
killing all 157 men, women and children on board.
It was only after this second crash that
Boeing and the FAA agreed to ground the 737 Max, and that was only after every
other major government in the world had rejected their claims that the plane
was safe and banned it from their airspace.
The report by the House Democrats cites
the testimony of Ed Pierson, a senior plant supervisor at the Renton,
Washington 737 Max production facility and retired Navy squadron commander,
before the committee last December. Pierson related how in 2018 he told 737
General Manager Scott Campbell of multiple safety problems and defects at the
Renton plant.
“For the first time in my life, I’m
sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane,”
he told Campbell, and added that the military would suspend production to address
the safety issues. Campbell replied, “The military is not a profit-making
organization.”
The report, which the Republican
committee members refused to endorse, makes clear that 346 lives were destroyed
and countless more threatened because the aircraft maker and defense
contracting giant made calculated decisions to sacrifice safety in order to
maximize market share and corporate profits.
But despite the incriminating evidence
in its own report, the Democratic majority proposes no actions to hold either Boeing
or FAA officials accountable. There are no calls for criminal prosecution, nor
are any financial penalties proposed.
This is under conditions where the
bipartisan CARES Act passed last March effectively earmarked $17 billion in
taxpayer money to prop up the company, and the Federal Reserve has backed up a
$25 billion bond sale by the firm as part of the government's
multi-trillion-dollar pandemic-triggered bailout of the US corporate elite.
Dennis Muilenburg, the Boeing CEO
throughout the period of 737 Max development, resigned under fire last
December, and received a severance package worth $80.7 million.
Even as the House releases its damning
report, moreover, the FAA is signaling that it will soon allow the 737 Max to
resume commercial flights.
The report cites five different areas of
negligence and cover-up. Under “Production Pressures,” it notes, “There was
tremendous financial pressure on Boeing and the 737 Max program to compete with
Airbus' new A320neo aircraft.”
In other words, Boeing, which accounted
for a huge portion of the rise on Wall Street following the election of Donald
Trump, was under the gun from major shareholders and banks to speed up
production of its new plane and cut costs in order to win the race with its
European-based rival for market share, particularly in expanding markets such
as China.
That market share, profit and stock
price eclipsed safety for Boeing was clear from the very origins of the 737
Max. Rather than design a new generation of medium-range carriers, Boeing decided
to save time and money by revamping its five-decade-old 737 model. The main
innovation was a larger engine that had to be placed higher up on the wing.
However, the company soon discovered that the new configuration resulted in a
tendency for the plane to stall.
In order to compensate for this design
flaw, Boeing installed a new automated flight control system called Maneuvering
Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS. The House report lists “Faulty
Design and Performance Assumptions” in connection with MCAS as the second major
factor in the crashes.
Boeing concealed the existence of MCAS
from its airline customers and their pilots in order to avoid having to retrain
pilots on flight simulators for the new aircraft, a costly and time-consuming
process.
Moreover, it designed MCAS to be
triggered by only one of the plane's two external angle-of-attack (A-O-A)
sensors, rather than by both, as is the accepted practice for functions that
are critical to the safety of an aircraft. Moreover, it failed to inform
airlines and pilots, as well as the FAA, that a warning alert listed as a
feature of the plane, which told the cockpit that the two sensors disagreed and
therefore one was malfunctioning, was inoperable on 80 percent of its active
737 Maxes.
As a result, when MCAS was set off on
the two doomed flights as a result of incorrect information from a faulty A-O-A
sensor, the pilots were unable to determine the cause of the repeated downward
plunges and incapable of stabilizing the planes.
That Boeing was acutely aware of the
problems with MCAS is shown by the fact that MCAS was referenced in half a
million emails and other internal documents.
Under the heading “Culture of
Concealment”, the report provides a multitude of examples of Boeing withholding
critical information from the FAA, its customers and Max pilots. This includes
internal test data from 2016 revealing that it took a Boeing test pilot more
than 10 seconds to diagnose and respond to un-commanded MCAS activation in a
flight simulation. The pilot described the situation as “catastrophic.” Federal
guidelines assume that pilots will respond to this condition within four
seconds.
The fourth area cited in the report is
titled “Conflicted Representation.” This is a euphemism for the FAA's total
subordination to Boeing and the lack of any serious regulatory oversight. The
report cites, in particular, the policy implemented under Democratic as well as
Republican administrations of delegating FAA oversight to Boeing employees.
These so-called “authorized representatives” routinely withheld from top FAA
officials safety issues that arose in the design, production and certification
of the 737 Max. In other cases, the FAA higher-ups sided with Boeing and
dismissed reported safety concerns.
In the end, the FAA
allowed Boeing to put the 737 Max into service without pilots having to undergo
training on flight simulators. Instead, it authorized a total of two hours of
“training” on an iPad.
In December 2018, some weeks after the
crash of Lion Air flight 610, the FAA conducted a risk assessment and estimated
that, without a fix to MCAS during the life of the 737 Max fleet, there could
be 15 additional fatal crashes resulting in over 2,900 deaths. Nevertheless,
the FAA allowed the 737 Max to continue flying while Boeing worked on a
software patch for MCAS, setting the stage for the crash of Ethiopian Airlines
flight 302 just weeks thereafter.
Finally, under the title “Boeing's
Influence Over the FAA's Oversight Structure,” the report gives multiple
examples of the FAA siding with Boeing and dismissing warnings from its own
experts.
The chairman of the House committee,
Peter DeFazio (Democrat from Oregon), said upon the release of the findings: “Our
report lays out disturbing revelations about how Boeing—under pressure to
compete with Airbus and deliver profits for Wall Street—escaped scrutiny from
the FAA, withheld critical information from pilots, and ultimately put planes
into service that killed 346 innocent people. What’s particularly infuriating
is how Boeing and FAA both gambled with public safety in the critical time
period between the two crashes.”
What he did not mention, however, is
that he and his fellow Democrats supported passage of the FAA Reauthorization
Act of 2018, which expanded the self-regulation of Boeing and other
corporations in the airline industry. In fact, the deregulation of the airline
industry was begun in 1978 under the Democratic administration of President
Jimmy Carter, leading to the dismantling of the Civil Aeronautics Board and its
replacement by the far weaker and more pliant FAA.
What neither the Democrats nor the media
speak about is the root cause of the mass deaths caused by Boeing and its
government accomplices—the capitalist profit system.
As the wrote titled
“Boeing executives must be tried for murder:”
The elevation of profit
above human life is the social essence of capitalism. The Max 8 disasters are
not merely symptoms of corporate greed, but the end result of the capitalist
system itself, which subordinates all social needs to private profit. There is
a basic contradiction between the interests of society, including safe,
efficient and inexpensive air travel, and the private ownership of essential
industries, as well as the division of the world economy among rival
nation-states. The same basic contradictions of capitalism are fueling the
geopolitical and economic conflicts that threaten nuclear war and ecological
disasters.
The only way to prevent
further disasters is to take the profit motive out of commercial flight, end
the dominance of Wall Street and replace the nightmare of the capitalist market
with a rationally planned and internationally organized system of air
transport. This requires the nationalization of the airline and aerospace
companies and their transformation into publicly owned and democratically
controlled utilities.
Boeing executives must be tried for murder
13 December 2019
Former
Boeing senior manager Ed Pierson testified on Wednesday before the House
Transportation and Infrastructure Commerce Committee that he warned senior
company management twice in the summer of 2018 that “deteriorating factory
conditions” at the Renton, Washington Boeing 737 production facility would
inevitably produce faulty and potentially deadly aircraft.
The report
by the ex-employee reveals another layer of the criminality and negligence of
Boeing executives, abetted by the regulatory agencies, in their drive to
generate multi-billion-dollar profits from the 737 Max 8 aircraft. It is more
evidence, this time by someone on the shop floor, that the leadership of Boeing
and the Federal Aviation Agency should be indicted for the murder of the 346
men, women and children killed in the two Max 8 crashes and for endangering the
lives of hundreds of thousands more that flew on the deadly aircraft.
Pierson’s
fears were realized four months after his second warning, when Lion Air Flight
610 plunged into the Java Sea after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing
all 189 passengers and crew on board. This was followed by a second crash of a
Max 8 jet just outside of Addis Ababa on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which
extinguished the lives of a further 157 human beings.
It was only after the second crash that Boeing decided to
ground the deadly plane worldwide, and that only occurred after international
outrage mounted when Boeing declared two days after the second crash that they
had “full confidence in the safety of the 737 Max.” These comments were backed
and echoed by the Federal Aviation Administration and US President Donald
Trump.
The same
House hearing also revealed that in the month after the first crash, an
internal analysis by the FAA determined that, unless the plane was grounded,
the Max 8 would average one fatal crash every two or three years, far more than
Boeing or the agency indicated at the time. This report was suppressed by the
agency for more than a year, even after the second crash in the span of less
than six months.
In other
words, the agency ostensibly responsible for ensuring the safety of airplanes
knew that the Max 8 would inevitably kill more people, and did nothing to
prevent the continued use of the plane.
The
immediate reason for both crashes was a previously unknown piece of software
known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which
erroneously activated as a result of a faulty angle-of-attack sensor and forced
both planes into an uncontrollable nosedive. The sensors, Pierson noted, were
replacements for the originals that were also defective, something that should
not have happened on airplanes only a few months old, pointing to serious
problems in the production of the Max 8 itself.
In an email
from June 2018 to Boeing Vice President Scott Campbell, the head of the Max 8
program, Pierson warned that “Frankly right now all my internal warning bells
are going off.” He explicitly noted the lack of skilled mechanics, electricians
and technicians, and an overtime rate that more than doubled and fatigued
workers. He added that “for the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that
I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane.”
In his
comments to the House, Pierson highlighted the “dogmatic focus on schedule”
after the company demanded that the facility increase the number of planes it
was making from 47 to 52 a month and the increased “product and worker-safety
risks.”
As a result,
Boeing’s internal quality tracking metrics found a 30 percent increase in
engineering and wiring defects, which can all cause potentially fatal faults in
an aircraft. This all could have impacted the broken MCAS sensors. In order to
address these problems, Pierson recognized the need to shut the factory down
“to allow our team time to regroup so we can safely finish the planes.”
Even as
factory conditions worsened, Boeing executives continued to stonewall Pierson.
During a meeting between Pierson and Campbell, in which the former reiterated
his plea to shut down production to address documented safety concerns, the
executive in charge of the 737 Max program told him, “We can’t do that. I can’t
do that” because Boeing is “a profit-making organization.”
The naked
greed embodied in this statement gives only a hint of the enormous sums of
money Boeing has made thanks to the Max 8 program. While the grounding of the
Max 8 and lawsuits by pilots and relatives of victims are expected to cost
Boeing $8 billion, the company increased in value by nearly $200 billion from
the time that the planes were announced in 2011 to when the entire fleet was
grounded.
Boeing’s
executives themselves also made immense personal fortunes. During the meteoric
rise of the company’s stock in January and February of this year, Chief
Financial Officer Gregory Smith, Executive Vice President John Keating, General
Counsel Michael Luttig and Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenberg all sold
shares worth $9.5 million, $10.1 million, $9.5 million and $6.5 million,
respectively.
These
figures belie any crocodile tears Boeing’s leadership have shed, especially
when one realizes that the second Max 8 crash occurred just one month after
these windfalls. It points to the likely fact that Boeing’s leadership was well
aware of the dangers of the aircraft and, rather than warn their pilots and
passengers, used the opportunity to cash in. The stock data should be used as
an exhibit for their trial.
Neither can
one accept the remarks made by the members of the House Transportation
Committee. In response to the release of the internal FAA document, Democratic
Representative Peter DeFazio from Oregon stated, “Despite its own calculations,
the FAA rolled the dice of the safety of the traveling public and let the 737
Max continue to fly.” The chairman of the House Transportation Committee made
no mention of the fact that he and his colleagues recently passed the FAA
Reauthorization Act, which gives Boeing and other airplane manufacturers even
more freedom from regulation and oversight.
Moreover,
the US, state and local governments have underwritten Boeing’s operations.
Since 1994, Boeing has received $74 billion in government subsidies and loans,
$14 billion of which have come just from the state of Washington. This money
has been funneled from the working class directly into the pockets of
executives and large shareholders.
This makes
clear the relationship between the US government and Boeing, the country’s
second largest defense contractor and the largest exporter. They do not have an
adversarial relationship, but rather represent the nexus between giant
companies, the state, and the military.
Despite
obvious and mounting evidence of 346 counts of murder on the part of Boeing
executives and government officials, no criminal charges have been brought
against the responsible parties. This is fully in keeping with recent
precedent, in which even the most horrendous corporate malfeasance has resulted
in no prosecutions. The purpose of the prosecution should be not only to put
these corporate killers behind bars, but to expose to the public the magnitude
of the criminal conspiracy to sacrifice lives for profit.
The
elevation of profit above human life is the social essence of capitalism. The
Max 8 disasters are not merely symptoms of corporate greed, but the end result
of the capitalist system itself, which subordinates all social needs to private
profit. There is a basic contradiction between the interests of society,
including safe, efficient and inexpensive air travel, and the private ownership
of essential industries, as well as the division of the world economy among
rival nation-states. The same basic contradictions of capitalism are fueling
the geopolitical and economic conflicts that threaten nuclear war and
ecological disasters.
The only way
to prevent further disasters is to take the profit motive out of commercial
flight, end the dominance of Wall Street and replace the nightmare of the
capitalist market with a rationally planned and internationally organized
system of air transport. This requires the nationalization of the airline and
aerospace companies and their transformation into publicly owned and
democratically controlled utilities.
Bryan Dyne
Bipartisan corporate bailout gives $17 billion
to Boeing
27 March 2020
The
bipartisan corporate “rescue” package awaiting approval by the House of
Representatives carves out of its more than $1 trillion in taxpayer handouts to
large businesses some $17 billion for airplane manufacturer Boeing. The
company’s cut is part of a $75 billion bailout of the airline industry as a
whole.
Though
Boeing is not explicitly named in the bill, the provision of $17 billion for
commercial air companies that are “important to maintaining national security”
is deliberately worded to apply to the nation’s biggest airplane manufacturer
and second biggest defense contractor. In a recent press conference, Trump
underscored the special treatment for Boeing, saying, “Yes, I think we have to
protect Boeing. We have to absolutely help Boeing.”
The company
may also have the opportunity to draw from the $500 billion set aside for
corporate bailouts in general.
Boeing
shares rose more than 25 percent on Wednesday on the heels of the unanimous
Senate passage of the bailout bill in the early morning hours. They extended
their gains by an additional 15 percent on Thursday, closing at $180. The
company’s shares have risen four straight days in anticipation of adoption of
the gargantuan fiscal measure. Its share price had fallen from a high of $440
in March of 2019 to a 52-week low of $89 this year.
The rescue
of Boeing by the federal government comes one year after the grounding of
Boeing’s flagship 737 Max 8 aircraft in the wake of two crashes—Lion Air Flight
610 outside of Jakarta, Indonesia and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 from Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia. Both occurred shortly after takeoff as a result of a fatal
design defect and the company’s rush to bring the new plane onto the market.
To date, no
executive who oversaw production of the plane or regulatory official who
approved it has been charged, much less prosecuted, for the development,
manufacture and marketing of the deadly plane and the death of 346 passengers
and crew on the two flights.
As has now
been proven, the crashes were caused by a piece of software known as the
Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). It was installed by
Boeing to compensate for the Max 8’s tendency to stall, a byproduct of
attaching a newer, larger engine onto the half-century-old Boeing 737 chassis.
The
aerospace giant used an old airframe in order to save time and money in
bringing to market a new model to compete with European-based Airbus for market
share and profit, particularly in the expanding Chinese market. It sold the
plane to airlines with the claim that 737 pilots required little additional
training, such as flight simulator training, to fly the new model.
In the
aftermath of the crashes and the grounding of the Max 8—which both Boeing and
the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) initially opposed—a myriad of reports
from aviation safety agencies internationally and leaked internal emails from
Boeing employees and officials have established that the company was well aware
of the dangerous flaws in the aircraft, but carried out a cover-up in order to
get the plane into the air.
The 737 Max
8 disaster has caused a sharp drop in Boeing’s income and share value over the
past year. The company’s airplane sales plummeted from 893 in 2018 to just 54
in 2019, and it shuttered its production of the Max 8 aircraft in January. It
has also been forced to borrow $13.8 billion to cover some of the estimated $20
billion lost in the wake of the grounding. At the same time, airlines have
massively reduced the amount of new planes they are buying in response to the
drastically reduced demand for air travel stemming from the pandemic.
Boeing
officials claim that the cash infusion from the government “will be used for
payments to suppliers to maintain the health of the supply chain.” However, its
actions in the wake of the 2008 bailout of Wall Street indicate that the bulk
of the money will go to push up Boeing stock and the wealth of executives,
hedge funds and major shareholders, which is tied to the massive inflation of
share values.
From 2014 to
2019, it spent just under $60 billion on stock buybacks and dividends, all of
which went into the pockets of its wealthy investors and top shareholders. This
includes ex-CEO DENNIS MUILENBERG who oversaw the introduction of the
deadly Max 8 jet.
It is
worth noting that the $60 billion figure equals what Boeing requested from the
government last week. In a statement, the firm said it “supports a minimum of
$60 billion… for the aerospace manufacturing industry.” Boeing would receive
the lion’s share of any such bailout.
The massive
sums being provided to Boeing sharply contrast with the pittance the corporate
giant has provided for the 346 families that lost loved ones in the two
crashes. Each received a mere $144,500 per crash victim from an account that is
overseen by notorious Wall Street ‘fixer’ Kenneth Feinburg. He is acting
to defend the airplane manufacturer’s profits and refurbish its public image.
The money to
the crash victims also pales in comparison to the money made by the current suite
of Boeing executives who sold off a great deal of stock just before the markets
began to tank at the end of February and beginning of March. These include
President and CEO of Boeing Defense Space & Security Leanne Caret, who sold
$5.9 million worth of stock, Executive Vice President Ted Colbert ($2.4
million), Senior Vice President B. Marc Allen ($2.3 million) and President and
CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes Stanley A. Deal ($2.5 million).
During this
same period, these executives rewarded themselves with gifts of stock worth, at
their 2019 height, $3.9 million, $2.3 million, $1.7 million and $4.0 million,
respectively. At least nine other members of Boeing’s leadership received
similar sums in the past month.
Boeing’s major investors also stand to make a killing off the company’s rising share prices. These include The Vanguard Group, Inc., which currently owns $11 billion in shares, Newport Trust Co., with $8.4 billion, and T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., holding $8.2 billion. If Boeing’s stock returns to its previous values, these companies stand to more than double the value of what they currently own.
The fix is in:
Kenneth Feinberg to oversee payouts to Boeing crash victims
26 February 2020
Boeing’s appointment last week of Kenneth Feinberg to
administer the aerospace giant’s $50 million Community Investment Fund to
compensate the communities affected by the two 737 Max 8 crashes and the
resulting 346 deaths leaves little doubt that the account will be used to
defend the airplane manufacturer’s multi-billion-dollar profits.
Feinberg played a similar role when he was selected in July
2019 to head the $50 million Boeing Financial Assistance Fund. In that role, he
oversaw payments of a mere $144,500 to each family that lost a loved one on
either the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 outside of Jakarta,
Indonesia or Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019 near Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia.
In total, Boeing has pledged only $100 million to
compensate the crash victims’ families and neighborhoods for putting their
friends and relatives on the deadly Max 8 jets. For comparison, the company
reported revenues of $76.6 billion in 2019 and has pledged to pay airlines at
least $5 billion for their lost profits resulting from the two crashes. To
date, no executives at the company or regulators at the Federal Aviation
Administration, which were all aware of the deadly flaws in the Max 8, have
been prosecuted or even charged for the murder of the 346 men, women and
children who were killed.
The selection of Feinberg to oversee both funds was
approved by Boeing’s executives with good reason. As Wall Street’s preeminent
corporate “fixer,” he has repeatedly been called upon to protect the interests
of the country’s corporate and political elite. In recent times, he has chaired
an escrow account to minimize compensation to victims of the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks in the US. He was also chosen by the Obama administration
as its “pay czar” to ensure that the heads of bailed-out Wall Street banks
received multi-million-dollar bonuses in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.
Feinberg’s chief responsibility will be to ensure that whatever
money Boeing does eventually pay out is vetted in such a way that the
corporation will ultimately be absolved for manufacturing lethal airplanes.
While Tim Keating, the Boeing executive who is overseeing the funds, has stated
that Boeing is “empower[ing] the [crash victims’] families to decide how to
allocate these funds,” a press release on the Community Investment Fund makes
clear that “governments and other interested parties” will have the final say.
This is not the first time Feinberg’s services have been
employed to minimize damage to major manufacturers in the wake of their
criminal negligence. He was hired by General Motors in 2015 after it was
exposed that the automaker hid an ignition switch fault in low-end GM vehicles
that killed at least 169 people. Under rules set by the Obama administration,
Feinberg rejected 90 percent of the claims submitted against GM for the
company’s criminal negligence, saving GM several billion dollars in liability
costs.
The fixer is playing a similar role for Boeing. The payouts
that Boeing gave directly to its victims’ families amounted to less than what
ex-CEO Dennis Muilenburg averaged in a month. The company is also using the
fund, and Feinberg’s skills, in an attempt to stave off other lawsuits. So far
only 50 families have come forward with additional claims, which Boeing has
settled out of court for $1.2 million for each life lost. If Feinberg is able
to convince the other 296 families that they should accept Boeing’s payout and
not seek further damages, it will save Boeing an estimated $355.2 million.
Other cases in which Feinberg has saved giant corporations
or the federal government hundreds of millions or billions of dollars include
suits by Vietnam citizens and US soldiers against Dow and Monsanto for
supplying Agent Orange to the American military, and ensuring that BP paid only
a quarter of what it originally claimed it would pay to people devastated by
the ecological catastrophe caused by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion.
Feinberg, who emerged as a political figure as chief of
staff for Senator Ted Kennedy in the late 1970s, was also appointed trustee of
the victim compensation fund for the notoriously dangerous Dalkon Shield, a birth
control device made by A.H. Robins. It was established that Robins knew of the
dangers the device posed to women’s health, including causing death, and
suppressed and destroyed such information where and whenever it could.
The Dalkon Shield ultimately caused life-threatening pelvic
infections in more than 200,000 women, with side effects including complete
hysterectomy, chronic pelvic pain and/or permanent infertility. Feinberg
ensured that each woman injured would receive money from the fund only if she
forfeited her right to sue outside of the settlement. Those who accepted the
deal received an average of $725.
Boeing is eager to receive similar windfalls. Over the past
year, Boeing’s total stock value has fallen more than $72 billion. It has been
forced to pay nearly $19 billion as a result of the grounding of its 737 Max
fleet, including compensation to airlines for canceled flights and maintenance
costs.
Feinberg is being used to minimize the money going to the
company’s victims and to silence criticism so the aerospace giant can get back
to business as usual as soon as possible.
It is still unclear, however, when or even if the Max 8
will ever fly again. Since its grounding last March, a steady stream of
internal leaks, news reports, interviews with former employees and
congressional hearings have provided a mountain of evidence that the plane is
fundamentally unsafe and should remain grounded indefinitely.
Just last week, in a report to the FAA, Boeing revealed
that it found trash and debris in the fuel tanks of 35 of 50 inspected Max 8s
that were being reviewed in preparation for the plane’s reintroduction into
service. Objects that were discovered in the fuel tanks included tools, rags,
shoe covers and other detritus, all of which can cause fires, block fuel lines
and trigger other potentially catastrophic problems.
The planes that were reviewed are among the nearly 400 Max
8s that were made after the jets’ grounding, which are all now being inspected.
According to company spokesman Bernard Choi, “It’s still undecided,” if Boeing
will mandate the inspection of the other 385 jets that have been delivered to
customers. He claimed, despite the past year’s evidence to the contrary, that,
“Obviously, we’ll do what’s right for safety.”
Both Boeing and the FAA also missed a fault in the
electrical wiring related to the aircraft’s horizontal wing, which can create a
short and cause an unrecoverable, uncontrolled dive similar to the Lion Air and
Ethiopian Airlines crashes. Boeing argues that because the same wiring
configuration was authorized for use on the older 737 NG model, it shouldn’t
need to inspect the wiring for the Max 8, basing itself on safety regulations
from the early 1990s.
It is likely, however, that the FAA will force Boeing to
resolve the fault, pushing back the relaunch of the Max 8 by months, in order
to relieve pressure from other regulatory agencies, particularly the European
Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). Even if the FAA approves the Max 8 to fly, it is
now a given that other countries will not allow the Max 8 to fly unless also
approved by the EASA, meaning that the Max 8 must satisfy two sets of
regulators if Boeing is to have any hope of pushing its flagship aircraft into
international aviation market
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