So, this whole Boeing thing. It turns out to be a confluence of numerous tributaries of shit, running together into the swamp.
The Max 8 flies very differently to other 737 models so, when Boeing was pushing it out to its airline customers, it had to tweak the autopilot settings to fake its handling to be like that of its predecessors. That way airlines, otherwise reluctant to invest in the new model because of pilot retraining time and expense, could roll it out (no pun intended) quickly, easily and cheaply. But they didn’t tell pilots about the new override parameters and since day 1 this plane has been trying to crash itself against the wishes of the pilots. This has been happening fleet-wide, worldwide; we’re lucky that it’s been only the two crashes thus far.
So, the world knows this plane is inherently unsafe at any altitude and it has been grounded or denied even overfly permission pretty much everywhere. Everywhere except the US, that is. Why is that?
Could it be that, after Trump nominated his own pilot to run the FAA (a pilot who couldn’t even keep the one plane he was flying for Trump properly registered) and his nomination went down like a... Trump hasn’t bothered to propose anyone else for the job. The top three positions at the FAA are prefaced with “acting”. Maybe this is the problem, but likely not as any Trump nominee is going to be worse than any random civil servant.
The Transportation secretary has the power to ground the Max 8s, but that’s Elaine Chao, wife of SwampKing and enemy of democracy Mitch McConnell, so there’s no way she is going to buck the White House.
Oh yeah, the White House. Boeing’s CEO has frequented Swamp-a-Lago numerous times and donated $1 million to Trump’s under-investigation inaugural committee. Moreover, Trump spoke with him on the phone this very morning where Boeing’s guy gave a strong denial against accusations that he screwed with the election tortured Otto Warmbier to death hacked up Kashoggi there is anything wrong with the Max 8.
So the Max 8 still flies over the US, dipping it’s nose when it feels like it. Meanwhile, despite the denials that there’s a problem, Boeing is rolling out a software patch to fix the non-problem. They have been working on it since the first Max 8 crash, but it was delayed by about a month due to the US government shut down.
If you count back a month from the likely roll out date of the patch, it would have preceded the Ethiopia crash.
Those people died because of Trump, Boeing and shitty US politics. I hope they’re the last, but I fear they won’t be.
PS Any US airline still running unpatched Max 8s is now culpable in any deaths resulting therefrom.