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I figure it’s about time for a 737-MAX update.  First, if you haven’t seen it, John Oliver’s Boeing dissection from last week is a tour-de-force and worth a watch.

Second, those fuckers running Boeing are stonewalling the NTSB in their investigation on the door plug blowout of Alaska Air 737-MAX-9.  Here’s an exchange between NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy and Senator Maria Cantwell:

“…[E]very shift is documented, you know the workers that were involved in this particular area, you can get their names, you can ask for interviews with those individuals. And you’re saying that that hasn’t happened?” Sen. Cantwell asked Chair Homendy.

“We have gone through emails, we’ve gone through texts, we’ve looked at pictures to begin to get a picture of the date in mid-September, the two dates in mid-September that we believe the work occurred,” Chair Homendy responded. “We haven’t received that information directly from Boeing. We also believe we know what shift it occurred on. But we still — there is one team … that deals with the doors, of 25 people. Why we don’t have those names today, two months later, is really disappointing.”

The reason they’re stonewalling is, of course, because the truth is appalling.  It’s obvious at this point that they let a 737-MAX leave the factory without four life-safety critical bolts installed.  Presumably these 25 folks will tell a tale of lax oversight, rush to get planes out the door, and general sloppiness.   I’m guessing the morons in charge at Boeing believe that we’ll all forget about this turd if they delay their response, but clearly that’s not going to happen.

Oliver’s piece compares the 737 to the DC-10, the last plane designed from scratch by McDonnell-Douglas before they merged with Boeing and effectively took over.  That turd took a hell of a long time, and a lot of dead passengers and crew, to get sorted out.  McDonnell-Douglas didn’t design another plane from scratch after that.  Instead they milked their old designs (DC-9 and DC-10) with an endless series of stretches and minor re-designs.  The last DC-10 variant, the MD-11, is notorious for being hard to land due to lack of engineering expenditure:

[T]he MD-11 is essentially a stretched DC-10, with winglets, a 2-crew cockpit (one fewer than on the DC-10), and a few other nips and tucks. Significantly, the designers increased the operating weight and the length of the aircraft, without re-engineering the wing and rudder. As a result, the aircraft has rather sluggish roll and yaw responses to control input at low speeds, i.e., on short finals and during the landing flare.

The second significant factor that affects the MD-11s landing performance is speed. In order to compensate for the MD-11’s higher operating weight and reduced rudder authority, its approach speeds can be substantially higher than other comparable commercial jets. […]

It’s only used as a freighter now, thankfully.   The legacy of “just one more stretch” lives on with the 737-MAX and the MCAS software “solution” to the engineering challenge of putting large modern high-bypass turbofans on a plane that first flew in 1967.

The amount of real value (not stock value) lost by the looting of Boeing by a bunch of MBAs is staggering.

Look Up! It’s a Bird, it’s a Plane, it’s a Turd!Post + Comments (63)

I didn’t watch the SOTU last night (haven’t for years) but I could tell that Biden did well by the Fox chyrons I saw at the gym.

First, it was Tish James supposedly getting booed by a bunch of NY Firefighters, thus obviously invalidating her extremely successful effort to put a hurt on DJT.  As an aside, I really don’t know what’s up with firefighters being Trumpy.  I mean, I get it, there are a lot of white middle-aged firefighters who are in Trump’s main demo, but what a way to shit all over your popularity by aligning yourself with that asshole.  They should leave it to the cops.

Second, giant flatulating anus in human form Mark Penn appeared to flog RFK’s candidacy.  It’s a three-man race, people!  Nevermind that RFK would probably take more votes from Trump than Biden.

There was no mention of Katie Britt’s Stepford-wife-off-her-meds fast-cycling-bipolar performance in her rebuttal speech, and there certainly wasn’t any video of Biden’s actual speech.

So, I’d say they’re scared. And they should be, since last night was one of the few times that their audience steps out of their bubble to see what everyone else sees, and what their audience saw probably looked at least halfway decent to them.

Biden’s Speech Was Great – By a Fair and Balanced MeasurePost + Comments (175)