Boeing's 737 Max jets not safe for use > Profits trump safety - Former Managers

 

Ex-senior Boeing manager warns flyers to avoid

737 MAX 9 jets: ‘I would absolutely not fly a MAX airplane’

By 

Social Links forMelissa Koenig

Published Jan. 31, 2024

 Updated Jan. 31, 2024, 11:04 a.m. ET

Former high-level Boeing managers and engineers have issued startling warnings for flyers to avoid the airplane giant’s troubled 737 MAX 9 jets as the model once again takes to the skies.

“I would absolutely not fly a MAX airplane,” one-time senior Boeing manager Ed Pierson bluntly told the Los Angeles Times of the model that recently saw a door plug blow out in midair on an Alaska Airlines flight.

“I’ve worked in the factory where they were built, and I saw the pressure employees were under to rush the planes out the door.”

Joe Jacobsen, a former Boeing engineer who has also worked at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), gave a similar warning, saying it was “premature” for airlines, including Alaska, to have resumed flying the jets.

“I would tell my family to avoid the MAX,” Jacobsen told the LA Times, claiming that his time at the company made him realize that profits were prioritized over quality control.

“I would tell everyone, really.”

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Ed Pierson, a former senior manager at Boeing, said he “would absolutely not fly a MAX airplane.”

KIRO 7 News

Boeing’s planes were temporarily grounded for a federal inspection earlier this month after an Alaska Airlines plane was forced to make an emergency landing when a section blew out in mid-flight — whipping the shirt off a young passenger.

President and CEO David Calhoun admitted days later that a “quality escape” had occurred, telling employees: “This event can never happen again.”

On Wednesday, he emailed employees, conceding that “scrutiny” from the accident “makes it absolutely clear that we have more work to do” to “strengthen our safety and quality processes.”

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An investigator examines the frame on a section of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 missing a panel on a Boeing 737-9 MAX in Portland, Oregon.

AP

Pierson said he had “tried to get them to shut down” even before 2018, when a Lion Air jetliner crashed into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people aboard.

In September, Pierson’s Foundation for Aviation Safety also published a study that found that airlines filed more than 1,300 reports about safety problems on Boeing’s MAX 8 and MAX 9 airplanes with the FAA.

Jacobsen, meanwhile, said the airplane manufacturer has been “trying to maximize profits” and “go with the lowest bidder” for years.

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Flight 1282 was forced to return to Portland International Airport on Friday, Jan. 5, 2024.

AP

“For the last 20 years, they’ve gone in this continual direction of towards financial engineering instead of technical engineering,” Jacobsen said, arguing the company was basically playing a game of Whack-a-Mole in which it would only fix issues once a problem began to emerge.

The National Transportation Safety Board is expected to release its preliminary findings about the Alaska Airlines near-disaster in the coming days.

The FAA has already allowed airlines to once again start flying Boeing MAX planes following its own “exhaustive [and] enhanced review.”

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Former Boeing employee Joe Jacobsen called the return of 787 MAX 9 jets “premature.”

AP

“Let me be clear: This won’t be back to business as usual for Boeing,” Administrator Mike Whitaker said in a statement last week.

“The quality assurance issues we have seen are unacceptable. That is why we have more boots on the ground closely scrutinizing and monitoring production and manufacturing activities.”

Alaska Airlines officials said it would fly the MAX 9s “only after the rigorous inspections are completed and each plane is deemed airworthy according to FAA requirements.”

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Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun departs after a meeting in the office of Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2024.

AP

About half of those inspections were completed by the end of last Monday, airline officials said, and its first MAX 9 departed from Seattle, Wash., on Friday and landed in San Diego, Calif., about an hour late.

United also started flying its MAX 9 fleet Saturday morning, with a flight from Newark, NJ, to Las Vegas, Nev.

But Jacobsen, the former FAA engineer, said the agency’s decision to allow the planes to fly again was “premature,” noting that he and other safety advocates have been sounding the alarm on numerous safety issues on both the MAX 8 and MAX 9 planes for years.

In fact, the FAA warned pilots last year to limit the use of an anti-ice system to just five minutes, after a serious defect was discovered in its engine that could cause debris to break off and “result in loss of control of the airplane.”

Boeing was seeking an engineering exemption from the FAA to exclude the MAX 7s from the line that needed to change its anti-ice system, but withdrew its petition on Monday.

The company is expected to release its fourth-quarter earnings in a call to investors Wednesday. Its stock prices have fallen about 19% since the midair blowout on Jan. 5.

In his email to employees Wednesday, Calhoun noted “tough and direct conversations with our customers, regulators and lawmakers” who are “disappointed.”

“We’ve taken significant steps over the last several years to strengthen our safety and quality processes, but this accident makes it absolutely clear that we have more work to do,” he acknowledged.

“This increased scrutiny — whether from ourselves, from our regulator, or from others — will make us better,” he told his staff.

“We have a serious challenge in front of us — but I know this team is up to the task.”

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Does Greed and Avarice Spell the Eventual Demise of Capitalism?

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Even young REPUBLICANS are growing tired of capitalism,

American pollsters say

25 Jun, 2021 14:22

A protester holds up an anarchist symbol flag during a Black Lives Matter protest in Manhattan, New York,

August 1, 2016 © Reuters / Andrew Kelly

Fewer than half of young Americans have a positive view of capitalism, a new poll has found. Even young Republicans are increasingly skeptical – but don’t expect America to go full-on socialist just yet.

An Axios poll published on Friday revealed that in the capitalist US, just 49% of Americans aged 18-to-34 actually support capitalism. And 51% say they have a positive view of socialism.

For several years, polling has found support for socialism rising among Democrats and the young. As a result, Democrats running on explicitly socialist platforms – like Democratic Socialists of America members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) – have translated this discontent into electoral success.

However, the latest poll found that young Republicans, usually tireless advocates for free-market capitalism, have grown sick of the system they’re used to defending. Among Republicans aged 18-to-34, some 66% now have a positive view of capitalism, down from 81% in 2019. But 56% of young Republicans want the government to focus on reducing wealth inequality, up from just 40% two years ago.

Axios puts this rise down to more Americans seeing the “tangible upsides of unprecedented levels of government intervention” during the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, then-President Donald Trump criticized both parties in Congress for agreeing on sending out “ridiculously low” stimulus checks of $600 in December, instead of the $2,000 he pushed for – criticism that would have been alien from a Republican president in recent decades. Equally rarely, Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib both agreed with Trump on the issue.

Yet the Right’s shift away from unfettered capitalism has been underway since before the pandemic hit. Fox News host Tucker Carlson, America’s most-watched cable news host and an influence on Trump during his tenure in the White House, has backed proposals by Democrats to break up the Silicon Valley tech monopolies, and vocally condemned the “mainstream Republican” focus on the “religion” of “market capitalism.”

“We do not exist to serve markets,” he said in 2019. “Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.”

Yet most Americans aren’t ready to declare themselves socialists just yet. While a slim majority of young Americans have a favorable view of the term, just 41% across all age groups share this view, and 52% say they have a negative view. Carlson would likely call himself a populist rather than a socialist, and Trump – a self-declared “nationalist” – frequently railed against the socialism practiced in Venezuela, Cuba and the Soviet Union, while passing tax cuts that significantly benefited the rich.

What the poll does reveal, however, is that Republicans might not be able to rely on calling their opponents “socialists” as a blanket pejorative for much longer. Aside from the fact that many Democrats wouldn’t argue with the label, a small but growing number of Republican voters might roll their eyes too.

As I have watched capitalism display its spectacular greed in the past two decades, I have become more and more disgusted. I am not a socialist, but I am old enough to have seen the damage done to too many societies from that. 

Capitalism only works in a society that is ethically determined to be good corporate citizens. These are very hard to find anymore. The amazing greed that caused the 2008 economic crash has not disappeared. Big Pharma is 100% about profits and 0% about health care. As a Canadian, I can't imagine living without full access to medical specialists for everyone. 

I think pharmaceutical research should be done in universities without the help of Big Pharma. Governments should pay for the research and collect a good portion of the dividends on profitable medications. There should also be room for research on medications that may not be highly profitable but may save money and lives in the long run. 

Someone should have done a major study on the effectiveness if Ivermectin last spring, but any such effort was destroyed by Big Pharma's propaganda. I wonder how many medications were ignored or disposed of because it would not make big profits for Big Pharma?

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Corruption is Everywhere - Even in an Estonian Bank

Estonian banker embroiled in money laundering scandal found dead

FILE PHOTO: Danske Bank flags at the bank's Estonian branch in Tallinn © Reuters / Ints Kalnins

The former boss of Danske Bank in Estonia, Aivar Rehe, was found dead on Wednesday after almost two days of searching, police have confirmed.

The 56-year-old banker left his home in Tallinn on Monday, leaving his dog and phone behind. After the search of a nearby forest, and places he usually visited, ended on Tuesday night, police continued looking for the man on Wednesday. Some 40 people, including volunteers, took part in the operation and drones were deployed to cover a wider area.

The body of the banker was eventually found in his backyard, according to local media. The report claims that everything at the scene points toward death by suicide. Police earlier said that the man was a danger to himself.

Rehe headed Danske Bank’s Estonian branch from 2006 to 2015, including the period when the lender was at the center of a €200-billion ($230-billion) money laundering scandal. He was not considered to be a suspect in the scheme.

Estonia’s central bank said that it saw more than $1 trillion in money flows between 2008 and 2017. While the regulator did not deem the transactions suspicious at the time, such a large amount of cross-border money flows is impressive for a tiny European country with an economic output of around $25 billion.

US Big Pharma Allowed to Continue Hiding ‘Intimidating’ Price Info from Customers in TV Ads

Corruption is Everywhere - While this may not technically fit the definition of corruption, what do you call it when Congress puts the profits of lobbyists over the welfare of the people they are supposed to be serving?

© Pixabay / TBIT

A federal judge has stepped in to save drug companies from a new rule that would have forced them to disclose drug prices in TV ads, ruling that the Department of Health and Human Services lacks authority over the industry.

“No matter how vexing the problem of spiraling drug costs may be, [Health and Human Services] cannot do more than what Congress has authorized,” US District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled on Monday, blocking the order, which was due to go into effect on Tuesday.

Amgen, Merck, and Eli Lilly, three of the largest US drug companies, and the Association of National Advertisers filed the lawsuit last month, claiming HHS lacked the legal authority to enforce the rule, which would have mandated that pharmaceutical ads display the list price of a 30-day supply of any drug covered under Medicare or Medicaid costing more than $35. The suit also claimed the order violated their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, but Mehta’s ruling didn’t address that argument.

Drug companies complained the rule would “confuse” and “intimidate” patients because insurers, including Medicare and Medicaid, negotiate discounts with drug companies, meaning the list price, often much higher, could cause sticker shock. But that argument got little sympathy from HHS secretary Alex Azar, who told the companies when he announced the rule in May:

If you’re ashamed of your drug prices,

change your drug prices. It’s that simple.

The US is one of only two countries worldwide where direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs is legal, and it is a massive market – $5.2 billion in 2016, according to CBS. According to HHS, the 10 most-advertised drugs have list prices from $488 to $16,938 per month or for a typical therapeutic course, numbers that would surely terrify the average consumer. 

President Donald Trump has made lowering the costs of prescription drugs one of his signature domestic issues, and the HHS rule was designed to bring those costs down, under the reasoning that pharmaceutical companies would be so embarrassed to float those gargantuan numbers on their ads that they’d cut the prices voluntarily.

Much of pharmaceutical advertising remains TV-based and the pharmaceutical industry has argued that it should be allowed to include pricing information on a dedicated website named in the ad. While it might seem absurd to expect consumers to drop everything and open their web browsers after seeing a TV ad they weren’t looking for in the first place, drug companies’ influence in Congress – they spent $4.1 billion on lobbying over the last 20 years, according to OpenSecrets.org, more than any other industry – means they tend to get what they want.

And the people have to pay the exorbitant profits of big pharma as well as the lobbying money that goes into the pockets of the country's lawmakers. As if they weren't already paying them enough.