Saturday, April 6, 2019

AMERICAN CAPITALISM AND MASS MURDER - THE CASE OF BOEING CEO DENNIS MUILENBURG AND THE MURDER OF HUNDREDS OF INNOCENT PEOPLE.... ALL FOR BIGGER PROFITS

Investigators have released their 

findings on the Ethiopian Airlines 

crash. They say the crew followed all the 

manufacturer's instructions for the 737 Max 

plane. Critics of the Federal Aviation 

Administration say the agency delegated to 

Boeing much of the testing of its jets — 

basically allowing the company to certify its 

own planes through self-regulation. The FAA 

isn’t alone in this.


Why aren’t Boeing executives be

ing prosecuted for the 737 Max 8 crashes?

It is nearly a month since the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which slammed into the ground only six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa airport, killing all 157 people on board. That disaster came less than five months after the fatal crash of Lion Air Flight 610 only 13 minutes after takeoff from Jakarta airport, killing all 189 passengers and crew members.
Both crashes involved the same airplane, the Boeing 737 Max 8, and both followed wild up-and-down oscillations which the pilots were unable to control.
In the weeks since these disasters, there have been no calls within the media and political establishment for Boeing executives to be criminally prosecuted for what were evidently entirely avoidable tragedies that killed a total of 346 people. This speaks to the corrupt relationship between the US government and the aerospace giant—the biggest US exporter and second-largest defense contractor—as well as the company’s critical role in the stock market surge and the ever-expanding fortunes of major Wall Street investors.
Black box recordings and simulations show that in the 60 seconds the pilots had to respond to the emergency, faulty software forced the Lion Air flight into a nose dive 24 separate times, as the pilots fought to regain control of the aircraft before plunging into the ocean at more than 500 miles per hour.
Evidence has mounted implicating in both crashes an automated anti-stall system, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which was installed by Boeing in response to the new plane’s tendency to pitch upward and go into a potentially fatal stall. On a whole number of fronts—design, marketing, certification and pilot training—information from the black boxes of the two planes points to a lack of concern for the safety of passengers and crew on the part of both Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, reaching the level of criminality.
The most recent revelations concerning the March 10 Ethiopian Airlines crash, based on preliminary findings from the official investigation, show that the pilots correctly followed the emergency procedures outlined by Boeing and disengaged the automated flight control system. Nevertheless, the nose of the plane continued to point downward. This strongly suggests a fundamental and perhaps fatal flaw in the design of the aircraft. Numerous questions have been raised about the design and certification process of the 737 Max 8 and MCAS, including:
  • Despite the presence on the plane of two angle-of-attack sensors, which signal a potential stall and trigger the automated downward pitch of the plane’s nose, MCAS relied on data from only one of the sensors. This means the standard redundancy feature built into commercial jets to avert disasters resulting from a faulty sensor was lacking. Boeing’s main rival to the 737 Max, the European-built Airbus A320neo, for example, uses data from three sensors to manage a system similar to MCAS.
  • Boeing Vice President Mike Sinnett admitted last November that cockpit warning lights alerting pilots of a faulty angle-of-attack sensor were only optional features on the Max 8.
  • The MCAS system was absent from pilot manuals and flight simulators, including for the well-known flight training program X-Plane 11, which came out in 2018, one year after the first commercial flight of the 737 Max 8.
  • Pilot training for the 737 Max 8, which has different hardware and software than earlier 737s, was a single one-hour computer course. Pilot certification for a commercial plane typically requires hundreds of hours of training, both in simulators and in actual flights. Boeing itself is now mandating at least 21 days of training on new Max planes.
There is no innocent explanation for these obvious safety issues. They point to reckless and arguably criminally negligent behavior on the part of Boeing executives, who rushed the new plane into service and marketed it against the Airbus A320neo on the basis of its cost-saving features. Threatened with a loss of market share and profits to its chief competitor, Boeing reduced costs by claiming that no significant training on the new Max 8 model, with the money and time that entails, was necessary for pilots with previous 737 experience.
Such imperatives of the capitalist market inevitably downgrade safety considerations. This is highlighted by a press release the day of the Ethiopian Airlines crash, in which Boeing stated that for “the past several months and in aftermath of Lion Air Flight 610,” the company “has been developing a flight control software enhancement for the 737 MAX.”
In other words, both Boeing and the FAA were aware, possibly even before the October 2018 Lion Air crash and certainly afterward, that a system critical to the safe operation of the aircraft needed to be fixed, and still allowed the plane to continue flying. The wording also suggests that the plane shouldn’t have been certified for flight in the first place.
This was aided and abetted by the Trump administration, which shielded Boeing as long as it could by not ordering the FAA to ground the plane immediately after the Ethiopian Airlines crash. There were no doubt immense concerns that such a move would cut into Boeing’s multibillion-dollar profits and affect its stock price, which has nearly tripled since the election of Trump in November 2016, accounting for more than 30 percent of the increase in the Dow Jones index since then.
Trump himself received a call from Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg two days after the Ethiopian Airlines crash, during which Muilenburg reportedly continued to uphold the Max 8’s safety. The FAA finally grounded the plane on March 13, after every other country in the world had done so.
The relationship between Trump and Muilenburg is only a symptom of the much broader collusion between the airline industry and the US government. Starting in 2005 and expanded during the Obama administration, the FAA introduced the Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) program, which allows the agency to appoint as “designees” airplane manufacturers’ employees to certify their own company’s aircraft on behalf of the government.
As a result, there was virtually no federal oversight on the development of the 737 Max 8. FAA Acting Administrator Dan Elwell told Congress, “As a result of regular meetings between the FAA and Boeing teams, the FAA determined in February 2012 that the [Max 8] project qualified … [a] project eligible for management by the Boeing ODA.” This extended to the MCAS system as well.
This is the logical end of the deregulation of the airline industry as a whole that was spearheaded by the Democratic Carter administration, which passed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978. With the help of liberal icon Edward Kennedy, the legislation disbanded the Civil Aeronautics Board, which up to that point treated interstate airlines as a regulated public utility, setting routes, schedules and fares.
In a rational world, the ongoing Senate hearings and Department of Justice investigations would have already brought criminal charges against Muilenburg, Sinnett, Elwell and all those involved in overseeing the production, certification and sale of the 737 Max 8. This would include the executives at Boeing and all those who have helped to deregulate the industry at the expense of human lives.
Under capitalism, however, Boeing will get little more than a slap on the wrist. Experts estimate the company will likely be fined at most $800 million, less than one percent of the $90 billion Boeing expects in sales from the Max 8 in the coming years. As in Hurricane Katrina, the Wall Street crash in 2008, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 and Hurricanes Harvey and Maria in 2017, the brunt of this disaster will be borne by the working class.
The Boeing 737 Max 8 disasters point to the inherent incompatibility between safe, comfortable and affordable air transport and private ownership of the airline industry, as well as the division of the world economy between rival nation-states. These catastrophes were driven by both the greed of Boeing executives and big investors and the intensifying trade conflict between the United States and Europe.
The technological advances that make it possible for travelers to move between any two points in the world in a single day must be freed from the constraints of giant corporations and the capitalist system as a whole. Major airlines and aerospace companies must be expropriated on an international scale and transformed into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities, as part of the establishment of a planned economy based on social need, not private profit.

Boeing CEO praised “streamlined” oversight of 737 plane that crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia

In a conference call with Wall Street firms in April of 2017, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg lauded the Federal Aviation Administration's “streamlined” certification process for enabling the aircraft manufacturer to rush its new 737 Max model into service.
“That’s helping us more efficiently work through certification on some of our new model aircraft such as the Max as it’s going through flight test and entering into service,” Muilenburg told the financial analysts. “So we’re already seeing some benefits there of some of the work that’s being done with the FAA.”
Four months later, the first 737 Max 8 commercial jet was brought into service. Since then it has become the giant aircraft makers' best-selling plane, accounting for 30 percent of its profits, which grew 24 percent in 2018 to $10.5 billion.
It is this aircraft that crashed in Indonesia in October of 2018 and on March 10 of this year in Ethiopia, killing all passengers and crew on board, a combined total of 346 people. In both cases, investigators have identified an automated system designed to counter the plane's tendency to stall, called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), as a key factor in the fatal crashes.
Muilenberg’s touting of the gutting of serious government oversight points to the systemic subordination of safety concerns to profit and market share and the transformation of regulatory agencies into rubber stamps for the major corporations.
CNN reported Muilenburg’s remarks on Thursday, the same day that the Ethiopian Transport Ministry released the results of its preliminary investigation into the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 just six minutes after takeoff from the airport in Addis Ababa. As in the Lion Air disaster just five months before, which crashed just 13 minutes after takeoff, the plane repeatedly pitched downward and the pilots were unable to regain control.
The Ethiopian report, based on information from the recovered flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, as well as communications between the pilots and air traffic controllers, contradicted attempts by Boeing and some media commentators to imply that pilot error, not design flaws or faulty equipment and software, was responsible for the disaster. It concluded that just a minute into the flight, one of two angle of attack sensors on the plane began emitting false readings, triggering the MCAS anti-stall mechanism and forcing down the nose of the aircraft.
Particularly damning for Boeing and the FAA was its finding that the pilots followed the emergency procedures provided by Boeing to counter such a development and manually stabilize the aircraft, but were unable to regain control of the plane. This shattered the claims made by both Boeing and the FAA after the Ethiopian crash that the steps provided to pilots to overcome such an emergency and manually fly the plane were simple and easy to carry out, and their suggestions that the Flight 302 pilots had failed to follow the prescribed emergency procedures.
The preliminary report issued by the Transport Ministry’s Accident Investigation Bureau explained that the pilots disengaged MCAS, but the plane continued repeatedly to pitch downward despite their efforts to manually raise the nose. It further concluded that the manual control in the cockpit designed to lift or lower the nose, called the manual trim, failed to work.
The Initial Findings state, in part:
  • After the autopilot disengaged, the DFDR (digital flight data recorder) recorded an automatic aircraft nose down trim command four times without pilot’s input.
  • The crew… confirmed that the manual trim operation was not working
It was at this point, some four minutes into the flight, and only then that the pilots reengaged MCAS, presumably in a desperate, last ditch attempt to save the plane. In the event, MCAS forced the nose down at a 40 degree angle, leading the plane to plunge to earth at an impact speed of 575 miles per hour.
The report’s Safety Recommendations unambiguously place the onus for the disaster on Boeing and US regulators and imply that a far more serious and thorough examination is needed than the software patch on which Boeing is working before there is any return to service by the 737 Max.
  • Since repetitive un-commanded aircraft nose down conditions are noticed in this preliminary investigation, it is recommended that the aircraft flight control system related to flight controllability shall be reviewed by the manufacturer.
  • Aviation authorities shall verify that the review of the aircraft flight control system related to flight controllability has been adequately addressed by the manufacturer before the release of the aircraft to operations.
This evaluation was underscored by Ethiopian Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges at a press conference in Thursday. She said, “The crew performed all the procedures repeatedly provided by the manufacturer but was not able to control the aircraft.”
Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the American Airlines pilots union and 737 pilot, was quoted Friday in the New York Times as saying:
“The captain was not able to recover the aircraft with the procedures he was trained on and told by Boeing.” Speaking of the MCAS system, he continued, “It was too aggressive. They left the pilot with no ability to gain control of the aircraft if it went to the full limit.”
Muilenburg, in a statement Thursday following the release of the Ethiopian report, acknowledged for the first time that faulty sensor data and MCAS played a role in the crash of Flight 302. However, the company and the FAA are planning only to add a software patch to MCAS that will prevent the system from being triggered by only one, instead of both sensors, and moderate the aggressiveness of its downward push of the nose.
However, virtually nothing is being said about the highly unusual design that allowed MCAS to be triggered by only one sensor in the first place. The standard design for systems that are critical to the safety of a commercial aircraft has always included some form of redundancy, so that the malfunction of a single sensor does not lead to disaster. Why the 737 Max was designed without such redundancy for the critical MCAS function, and why no change was made after the Indonesian crash last October, has not been explained.
Even as Muilenburg and Boeing reaffirmed the “fundamental safety” of the 737 Max, the company announced Thursday that it had discovered another problem requiring an additional software patch, further delaying the implementation of changes to the MCAS system. While a company spokesman called the new problem “relatively minor,” the Washington Post cited two officials “with knowledge of the investigation” as saying the new problem related to software affecting flight control hardware and was there classified as “critical to flight safety.”



Jim Carrey: America ‘Doomed’ If We Don’t Regulate Capitalism



HOLLYWOOD, CA - NOVEMBER 18: Jim Carrey attends 'Jim Carrey In Conversation with Jerry Saltz' during Vulture Festival Presented By AT&T at Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on November 18, 2018 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for New York Magazine)
Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for New York Magazine
BREITBART NEWS
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10:09

LAS VEGAS (AP) — At the just-wrapped CinemaCon, celebrities talked about their upcoming movies but much much more. From Linda Hamilton and her “strange” return to the “Terminator” franchise to Jamie Lee Curtis demanding Joe Biden apologize to Anita Hill to Jim Carrey talking about his politically inspired paintings, stars had a lot to say at the Las Vegas event.

LINDA HAMILTON: PLAYING SARAH CONNER IS “MORE REWARDING NOW” IN NEW “TERMINATOR: DARK FATE”
Linda Hamilton says returning as Sarah Connor almost 30 years later in “Terminator: Dark Fate,” is “a little strange.”
“I would say it’s like riding a bicycle but it’s not,” said Hamilton. “I mean I really worked hard for a year before we started shooting to just figure out what I’m like, what the character is like as a woman of a certain age and the way that she moves.
“I mean I worked on her long. I worked on just my places of deepest sorrows so that I could catch them when I needed to. And it’s really interesting to transform a woman from a young icon as I played back then, to this. It was more rewarding to play her now than it’s ever been.”
Hamilton joins Arnold Schwarzenegger as they return to their iconic roles in the new “Terminator” flick directed by Tim Miller (“Deadpool) and co-produced by James Cameron.
“Terminator 2: Judgment Day” was released in 1991, almost 30 years ago. That story followed Sarah Connor (Hamilton) and her ten-year-old son as they are pursued by a new, more advanced Terminator. Hamilton says Connor returns just as fierce as she was before.
“You do these things and you don’t go, ‘I’m a bad ass. I am a bad ass,’” she said. “That’s not the way it works but actually this time after I finished, I was like, ‘You know what? I am a bad ass.’ I got through it, it was really hard.”
“Terminator: Dark Fate” opens in U.S. theaters November 1.
JAMIE LEE CURTIS IS PUSHING FOR JOE BIDEN APOLOGY
Jamie Lee Curtis is pushing for an apology from Joe Biden over his treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991.
The politically active actress was at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Thursday promoting her murder mystery “Knives Out.”
Biden has expressed regret over the questioning of Hill by senators when he chaired the hearings, which explored Hill’s sexual misconduct allegations against Thomas, then a U.S. Supreme Court justice nominee. Thomas denied the allegations and was later confirmed to the court.
“Obviously it’s a difficult time. I think what has dogged him particularly is Anita Hill. And I know her. And there is a point where if he doesn’t pick up the phone and call her and say this is been way too long … and I just think he needs to give it directly to her and let her have the opportunity to receive that,” Curtis said.
Biden, who is widely expected to pursue the Democratic nomination for president, had faced his own firestorm this week after at least two women accused him of touching them inappropriately. Biden apologized in a video for being overly familiar.
Curtis, 60, had less to say about that.
“It’s a shame because he’s a good man and I think he would make a good candidate, but the Anita Hill thing — problem for me,” said Curtis, who added that she was currently “window shopping” among the various Democratic presidential candidates.
Curtis’ “Knives Out” also stars Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Lakeith Stanfield, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette and Ana de Armas. It’s due out later this year.
“DORA” HELPS ISABELA MONER CONNECT WITH PERUVIAN ROOTS
Isabela Moner, who plays the lead character in “Dora and the Lost City of Gold,” says the film gave her a chance to connect with her Peruvian ancestry.
The actress and singer said she had to learn how to speak Quechua, the indigenous language spoken primarily in the Peruvian Andes.
“There’s a lot of ‘K’s’, there’s a lot a lot of ‘Q’s,’” she said about the indigenous language. “It’s Iike, really interesting.
Moner also relished being part of a predominately Latino cast.
“Eugenio Derbez, Eva Longoria, Michael Peña and we had this one white guy. The token white guy. It was so fun to be able to just speak Spanish on set casually and not have anyone to be like ‘What are you saying?’” she said. “No, it was just a natural environment where we could be ourselves.”
Eva Longoria plays her on-screen mom. Longoria said she couldn’t help becoming motherly and over protective of 17-year-old Moner.
“I was like, ‘Listen to me you are talented, you are amazing, don’t mess up. Don’t go down the wrong way’ and she’s not. She’s so elegant and smart and grounded and she has an amazing family. So, I was so excited to be in her presence. She’s a movie star this little girl. Nobody could’ve played it Dora except Isabela Moner,” said Longoria.
What the former “Desperate Housewives” star did not want to discuss was her ex co-star Felicity Huffman’s arrest in the recent college bribery admissions scandal.
When asked about it, she said she hadn’t spoken to her and walked away.
“Dora and the Lost City of Gold” opens in U.S. theaters August 2.
JIM CARREY HAD FUN “BEING OVER THE TOP AGAIN” FOR NEW “SONIC THE HEDGEHOG” MOVIE
Jim Carrey has returned to his specialty, physical comedy. He’s back as the bad guy in “Sonic the Hedgehog.”
“It’s a wonderful opportunity to just be an arch evil guy and just be completely over the top again and have some fun with reality, you know. So, I always like that opportunity when it comes along, I am game for that,” Carrey said at CinemaCon on Thursday.
He plays Sonic’s nemesis, Dr. Robotnik better known by the alias Dr. Eggman. Ben Schwartz does the voice for Sonic the Hedgehog.
Carrey didn’t know much about the hedgehog, so he had to read up and do some research. Some say the character Eggman gets his name from the Beatles song “I Am The Walrus.”
“I loved the materials and I loved the little nods to the Eggman and all that stuff. I come from Beatles culture so for me, I don’t know if that’s a problem for them, but I like the fact that you know, everything in my life is a Beatles reference of some sort we know,” said Carrey with a smile.
Carrey also said a few words as to why it was important to him to continue to draw political cartoons to post on his Twitter feed.
“Well you know, it’s just a little solace to me in this odd time of complete capitalism breakdown,” he said. “Just a little regulation would help, you know. That’s all. It’s just without that, we are doomed so we are spiraling out of control and its corruption on every level and every walk of life. It’s all attributed to that, so I really think we need to turn that around.”
James Marsden stars as Tom Wachowski, the newly appointed sheriff of Green Hills who befriends Sonic and aids him in his quest to stop Dr. Robotnik. Just like most of the cast, Marsden is a big Carrey fan.
“He’s a legend and he’s one of my heroes. One of my comic heroes,” said Marsden. “So, to see him after 10 years come back and enjoy doing the thing that he had enjoyed for so long is pretty special and he crushes and it’s so fun to see.”
“Sonic the Hedgehog” opens in U.S. theaters November 8.
TARON EGERTON SAYS HIS NUDE SCENES IN THE ELTON JOHN BIOPIC ARE MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
Taron Egerton confirms that he has nude scenes in the new Elton John biopic “Rocketman,” but the same-sex love scenes are being overhyped.
“There is a little bit of male intimacy in the film, but I am sort of getting to the point where I am reluctant to talk about it because it’s been so talked about and there’s so much to celebrate about the film,” he said. “But you see a little bit of me, yeah.”
Egerton plays John in the movie, which tells the icon’s story through song, dance, and a bit of fantasy. It’s helmed by Dexter Fletcher, who directed the Freddie Mercury-Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which won Rami Malek the best actor Academy Award earlier this year.
Egerton got a chance to meet John during filming, and they’ve become friends.
“I was asked to go and meet him, and I was so nervous,” said Egerton. “He’s been nothing but lovely and since then I have gotten to know him rather well.”
“Rocketman” shoots into U.S. theaters May 31.
DAVE BAUTISTA: DISNEY ‘REALIZED VERY EARLY ON’ THAT FIRING JAMES GUNN FROM ‘GUARDIANS’ WAS ‘A BAD CALL’
Dave Bautista says Disney “realized very early on” that firing “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn over years-old offensive tweets was “a bad call.”
Bautista was at CinemaCon promoting the action comedy “My Spy.” He had been publicly lobbying to have Gunn rehired to the Marvel franchise, and Disney announced the reversal last month.
“I think that they realize that it was a very rash decision. But I think that they thought at that time that they were doing the right thing. But I think in retrospect they realized they didn’t and they just didn’t know how to save face and go back on that,” said Bautista, who stars alongside Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldana in the “Guardians” films. “And I think they finally just said we are going to do the right thing and rehire James. … I think they realized very early on that it was kind of a bad call.”
Gunn was fired last July over tweets from nearly a decade ago in which he joked about subjects like pedophilia and rape. Disney Chairman Alan Horn at the time said Gunn’s words were inconsistent with the studio’s values.
Gunn has since signed on to write and direct the next installment of Warner Bros.′ “Suicide Squad” for the Marvel rival DC Comics. That film is to shoot in the fall and be released in August 2021.
Bautista says he hopes to join that film as well.
HALLE BERRY READY FOR MORE ‘JOHN WICK’
Halle Berry and “John Wick 3” director Chad Stahelski say the actress will be back for the fourth installment in Keanu Reeves’ action franchise.
“I’m going to say yes, because I got the first job by doing that. So I’m going to say yeah, I’m all over the next one,” Berry said on Thursday.
“Her character Sofia is not going anywhere,” Stahelski added.
Berry and Stahelski were promoting “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum,” out next month.
The 52-year-old Oscar winner said she relished her preparation for the role of an assassin who teams up with Reeves’ John Wick character.
“I got to train really, really hard, harder than I have ever trained,” she said. “I got to work at these guys one-on-one personally for five, six months. And that kind of training, you can’t buy. And you can’t certainly get to the level that I got to in in five months. It takes two people two or three years. So I got all of this training under the guise of doing my work. And it was fun! Yeah, I got the intense version and it was amazing.”


THE WALL STREET BOUGHT AND OWNED DEMOCRAT PARTY
SERVING BANKSTERS, BILLIONAIRES and INVADING ILLEGALS

THE CRONY CLASS:

Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.



“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”

INCOME PLUMMETS UNDER OBAMA AND HIS WALL STREET CRONIES (THERE'S A REASON WHY GEORGE SOROS RUNS OBAMA'S BID FOR A THIRD TERM FOR LIFE).



 CRONY CAPITALISM

Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US

history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.


OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to

the top 1% of the world’s wealthy. 

*
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ----Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER



Investigators have released their 

findings on the Ethiopian Airlines 

crash. They say the crew followed all the 

manufacturer's instructions for the 737 Max 

plane. Critics of the Federal Aviation 

Administration say the agency delegated to 

Boeing much of the testing of its jets — 

basically allowing the company to certify its 

own planes through self-regulation. The FAA 

isn’t alone in this.


Why aren’t Boeing executives be

ing prosecuted for the 737 Max 8 crashes?

It is nearly a month since the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which slammed into the ground only six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa airport, killing all 157 people on board. That disaster came less than five months after the fatal crash of Lion Air Flight 610 only 13 minutes after takeoff from Jakarta airport, killing all 189 passengers and crew members.
Both crashes involved the same airplane, the Boeing 737 Max 8, and both followed wild up-and-down oscillations which the pilots were unable to control.
In the weeks since these disasters, there have been no calls within the media and political establishment for Boeing executives to be criminally prosecuted for what were evidently entirely avoidable tragedies that killed a total of 346 people. This speaks to the corrupt relationship between the US government and the aerospace giant—the biggest US exporter and second-largest defense contractor—as well as the company’s critical role in the stock market surge and the ever-expanding fortunes of major Wall Street investors.
Black box recordings and simulations show that in the 60 seconds the pilots had to respond to the emergency, faulty software forced the Lion Air flight into a nose dive 24 separate times, as the pilots fought to regain control of the aircraft before plunging into the ocean at more than 500 miles per hour.
Evidence has mounted implicating in both crashes an automated anti-stall system, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which was installed by Boeing in response to the new plane’s tendency to pitch upward and go into a potentially fatal stall. On a whole number of fronts—design, marketing, certification and pilot training—information from the black boxes of the two planes points to a lack of concern for the safety of passengers and crew on the part of both Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, reaching the level of criminality.
The most recent revelations concerning the March 10 Ethiopian Airlines crash, based on preliminary findings from the official investigation, show that the pilots correctly followed the emergency procedures outlined by Boeing and disengaged the automated flight control system. Nevertheless, the nose of the plane continued to point downward. This strongly suggests a fundamental and perhaps fatal flaw in the design of the aircraft. Numerous questions have been raised about the design and certification process of the 737 Max 8 and MCAS, including:
  • Despite the presence on the plane of two angle-of-attack sensors, which signal a potential stall and trigger the automated downward pitch of the plane’s nose, MCAS relied on data from only one of the sensors. This means the standard redundancy feature built into commercial jets to avert disasters resulting from a faulty sensor was lacking. Boeing’s main rival to the 737 Max, the European-built Airbus A320neo, for example, uses data from three sensors to manage a system similar to MCAS.
  • Boeing Vice President Mike Sinnett admitted last November that cockpit warning lights alerting pilots of a faulty angle-of-attack sensor were only optional features on the Max 8.
  • The MCAS system was absent from pilot manuals and flight simulators, including for the well-known flight training program X-Plane 11, which came out in 2018, one year after the first commercial flight of the 737 Max 8.
  • Pilot training for the 737 Max 8, which has different hardware and software than earlier 737s, was a single one-hour computer course. Pilot certification for a commercial plane typically requires hundreds of hours of training, both in simulators and in actual flights. Boeing itself is now mandating at least 21 days of training on new Max planes.
There is no innocent explanation for these obvious safety issues. They point to reckless and arguably criminally negligent behavior on the part of Boeing executives, who rushed the new plane into service and marketed it against the Airbus A320neo on the basis of its cost-saving features. Threatened with a loss of market share and profits to its chief competitor, Boeing reduced costs by claiming that no significant training on the new Max 8 model, with the money and time that entails, was necessary for pilots with previous 737 experience.
Such imperatives of the capitalist market inevitably downgrade safety considerations. This is highlighted by a press release the day of the Ethiopian Airlines crash, in which Boeing stated that for “the past several months and in aftermath of Lion Air Flight 610,” the company “has been developing a flight control software enhancement for the 737 MAX.”
In other words, both Boeing and the FAA were aware, possibly even before the October 2018 Lion Air crash and certainly afterward, that a system critical to the safe operation of the aircraft needed to be fixed, and still allowed the plane to continue flying. The wording also suggests that the plane shouldn’t have been certified for flight in the first place.
This was aided and abetted by the Trump administration, which shielded Boeing as long as it could by not ordering the FAA to ground the plane immediately after the Ethiopian Airlines crash. There were no doubt immense concerns that such a move would cut into Boeing’s multibillion-dollar profits and affect its stock price, which has nearly tripled since the election of Trump in November 2016, accounting for more than 30 percent of the increase in the Dow Jones index since then.
Trump himself received a call from Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg two days after the Ethiopian Airlines crash, during which Muilenburg reportedly continued to uphold the Max 8’s safety. The FAA finally grounded the plane on March 13, after every other country in the world had done so.
The relationship between Trump and Muilenburg is only a symptom of the much broader collusion between the airline industry and the US government. Starting in 2005 and expanded during the Obama administration, the FAA introduced the Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) program, which allows the agency to appoint as “designees” airplane manufacturers’ employees to certify their own company’s aircraft on behalf of the government.
As a result, there was virtually no federal oversight on the development of the 737 Max 8. FAA Acting Administrator Dan Elwell told Congress, “As a result of regular meetings between the FAA and Boeing teams, the FAA determined in February 2012 that the [Max 8] project qualified … [a] project eligible for management by the Boeing ODA.” This extended to the MCAS system as well.
This is the logical end of the deregulation of the airline industry as a whole that was spearheaded by the Democratic Carter administration, which passed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978. With the help of liberal icon Edward Kennedy, the legislation disbanded the Civil Aeronautics Board, which up to that point treated interstate airlines as a regulated public utility, setting routes, schedules and fares.
In a rational world, the ongoing Senate hearings and Department of Justice investigations would have already brought criminal charges against Muilenburg, Sinnett, Elwell and all those involved in overseeing the production, certification and sale of the 737 Max 8. This would include the executives at Boeing and all those who have helped to deregulate the industry at the expense of human lives.
Under capitalism, however, Boeing will get little more than a slap on the wrist. Experts estimate the company will likely be fined at most $800 million, less than one percent of the $90 billion Boeing expects in sales from the Max 8 in the coming years. As in Hurricane Katrina, the Wall Street crash in 2008, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 and Hurricanes Harvey and Maria in 2017, the brunt of this disaster will be borne by the working class.
The Boeing 737 Max 8 disasters point to the inherent incompatibility between safe, comfortable and affordable air transport and private ownership of the airline industry, as well as the division of the world economy between rival nation-states. These catastrophes were driven by both the greed of Boeing executives and big investors and the intensifying trade conflict between the United States and Europe.

The technological advances that make it possible for travelers to move between any two points in the world in a single day must be freed from the constraints of giant corporations and the capitalist system as a whole. Major airlines and aerospace companies must be expropriated on an international scale and transformed into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities, as part of the establishment of a planned economy based on social need, not private profit.

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