"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths." Northwoods is a ministry dedicated to refreshing Christians and challenging them to search for the truth in Christianity, politics, sociology, and science
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Showing posts with label quality control. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quality control. Show all posts
Air Canada says one of its flights from Toronto to Delhi on Monday evening developed an engine issue shortly after take-off and had to land back at Pearson airport.
The airline said Flight AC042, which left Toronto at 7:44 p.m. Monday, requested a “priority landing,” as the return was not scheduled, after discovering the engine issue.
The engine was shut down following standard operating procedures, the airline said, adding that the aircraft are designed to operate with one engine and their pilots are trained to fly safely in such situations.
“The aircraft landed normally and taxied to the gate,” Air Canada said in a statement to Global News.
The passengers originally on that flight will be travelling to Delhi on a new flight.
Ed Clark, who led Boeing’s troubled department that also oversees the production of its embattled Max 9 model, is leaving immediately, Stan Deal, the chief executive of the commercial airplanes unit, said in a Wednesday memo to employees obtained by The Post.
According to his LinkedIn, Clark’s exit caps off a nearly 15-year stint at the Seattle-based firm.
He was promoted to take over the Max program in 2021, according to The New York Times, when the company was accelerating production following two 737 Max 9 crashes — in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in March in 2019 — that killed a combined 346 people.
Those crashes resulted in a temporary global grounding of 737 Max jets and sparked a firestorm of questions about Boeing’s safety procedures.
Clark’s departure was part of a larger leadership overhaul: Deal also told staffers on Wednesday that Elizabeth Lund would move from her post as senior vice president of airplane programs to “the new position of senior vice president for BCA Quality, where she will lead our quality control and quality assurance efforts.”
Mike Fleming, a former senior design engineer, stepped into Lund’s previous role, said Deal, who also shared other internal succession plans — all effective immediately.
Deal said that the shakeup was implemented to continue the company’s “enhanced focus on ensuring that every airplane we deliver meets or exceeds all quality and safety requirements. Our customers demand, and deserve, nothing less.”
In recent weeks, Boeing has also been overhauling its quality-control processes after a now-infamous fuselage blowout on Jan. 5 when an Alaska Airlines-operated Boeing 737 Max 9 climbed to 16,000 feet after taking off from Portland, Ore.
The Virginia-based company had said its increasing inspections as its Renton, Wash.-based factory, where Clark helmed Max production-related operations, per The Times.
The event has become a full-blown safety and reputational crisis for Boeing, which has been notified by its supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, of additional manufacturing issues in some 50 undelivered 737 Max 9 planes.
Still, all Boeing 737 Max 9s have already returned to the skies after reportedly undergoing a lengthy inspection process by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, Jennifer Homendy, said on “CNN This Morning” early this month said at the time that she “would have no problem tomorrow taking a flight on a Max 9.”
“There is no way that this plane should have been delivered with four safety critical bolts missing,” Homendy added, noting “a problem in the process.”
Alaska Airlines and United Airlines are the only two US carriers that operate the Max 9 Boeing model.
She also said that that NTSB has to do a better job at “digging into what’s going on at Boeing,” noting that she agrees with FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker’s testimony before Congress on Tuesday, when he said that the agency has been depending too much on aircraft makers like Boeing to regulate themselves, per CNN.
“The current system is not working ‘cause it’s not delivering safe aircraft,” Whitaker added. “So we have to make some changes to that.”
“I absolutely agree that it needs to change,” Homendy told CNN, adding that the issue is more of “a quality control problem,” and goes beyond Alaska Airlines’ fuselage blowout last month.
A United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Boston was diverted to Denver on Monday after the plane’s wing started coming apart mid-flight — and a passenger managed to capture footage of the unnerving issue.
Kevin Clarke pulled out his phone to record video of damage to the plane’s structure, which appeared to show the wing slat missing large chunks and beginning to separate from the rest of the wing.
“Just about to land in Denver with a broken wing on the plane,” Clarke can be heard saying in the video.
Clarke told WCVB that as the wheels lifted off in San Francisco, he felt an “incredibly strong vibration” and started to become worried about the plane’s shaking.
“Sitting right on the wing and the noise after reaching altitude was much louder than normal. I opened the window to see the wing looking like this,” user octopus_hug wrote. “How panicked should I be? Do I need to tell a flight crew member?”
There were 165 passengers on board the Boeing 757-200, which landed safely in Denver.
“United Flight 354 was diverted to Denver yesterday afternoon to address an issue with slats on the aircraft’s wing,” the airline said Tuesday in a statement to NBC Boston.
“The flight landed safely and we arranged for another aircraft to take our customers to Boston,” it said.
Earlier this month, the head of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration vowed it would put more people in place to monitor aircraft manufacturing after a door panel blew off an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft in January.
A self-described “survivalist” who was “totally outfitted” in body armor allegedly shot and killed four people, including a baby, near Lakeland, Florida, before surrendering after a shootout with sheriff’s deputies.
The murders occurred around 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, and the victims included a man, two women and a baby boy who died in his mother’s arms, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told reporters. An 11-year-old girl also was shot multiple times but was expected to survive after being rushed to surgery.
I will never be able to unsee that mother laying there with her dead infant in her arms.
The shooter was identified as Bryan Riley, 33, a former Marine Corps sharp-shooter who had tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.He surrendered after being wounded in a gun battle with deputies. Riley told deputies after his arrest that he was on methamphetamine, and he tried to wrestle a gun away from a Lakeland police officer while being treated at a hospital for his gunshot wound.
The suspect is a resident of Brandon, Florida – near Tampa – and is employed as a bodyguard. He also told deputies that his victims “begged for their lives, and I killed them anyway,” according to Judd. The sheriff called Riley “evil in the flesh, a rabid animal.” He also allegedly killed the family’s dog.
Riley’s girlfriend told investigators that he suffered from PTSD and depression. He first came in contact with the Polk County family on Saturday, when he allegedly told 40-year-old Justice Gleason, who was mowing his lawn, that God had given him a vision that his daughter “Amber” would commit suicide. Gleason, who had no daughter by that name, threatened to call police, but Riley reportedly said, “No need to call the cops, I’m the cops for God.”
On Saturday night, the sheriff’s office got a call from the Gleason residence reporting a suspicious person. The man, allegedly Riley, told a woman at the home, “God sent me here to speak with one of your daughters.” The man was gone when a deputy arrived, and his truck wasn’t found in a search of the area, Judd said.
Nine hours later, a sheriff’s lieutenant responding to a nearby call heard two volleys of automatic gunfire. Within seconds, the sheriff’s office began receiving calls reporting an active shooter. Deputies arrived to see a truck on fire and a man wearing body armor, though they didn’t spot a gun, Judd said. He ran back in the house, and deputies heard a volley of gunfire, followed by “a woman’s scream and a baby whimper,” the sheriff said.
A gun battle ensued, and despite as many as hundreds of shots being fired between deputies and the suspect, no law enforcement officers were injured, Judd said. The sheriff lamented that Riley came out of the house with his hands up and no gun.
He either wasn't trying to kill any of the sheriff's deputies, or he was a lousy sharpshooter.
“It would have been nice if he’d come out with a gun, and then we’d have been able to read a newspaper through him and we’d have had a different conversation here this morning,” Judd told reporters. “But when someone chooses to give up, we take them into custody peacefully.”
If he’d given us the opportunity, we’d have shot him up a lot, but he didn’t because he was a coward. You see, it’s easy to shoot innocent children and babies and people in the middle of the night when you’ve got the gun and they don’t. But he was not much of a man.
After Riley’s surrender, deputies discovered the injured girl and three deceased victims -- including Justice Gleason, a 33-year-old woman and her three-month-old son – in the house. They found another victim, a 62-year-old woman, in another house on the property.
Gun control advocates quickly seized on the massacre as another example of the need for stricter firearms laws, while others suggested that the shooter wasn’t killed by law enforcement because he’s white. But Judd argued a different political lesson learned from the shootings.
“Our crime rate in this county is at a 49-year low . . ., but when you get a nut job like this, statistical data makes no difference,” the sheriff said. “I mean, this guy was wired up on dope, on meth -- you know, what those people think is low-level, non-violent meth -- here’s your sign, today, again, and he came here for a gun battle.”
We can go deeper than that! His tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as a sniper turned him into the maniac that he was.
300 British troops offered hearing loss tests after
£5.5bn Ajax tank trials halted over noise complaints
More than 300 British soldiers are being offered hearing loss assessments after trials of the £5.5 billion Ajax armoured vehicle programme were halted due to an excessive number of noise complaints, a minister has admitted.
In a written statement to Parliament on Monday, Minister for Defence Procurement Jeremy Quin said that the Ajax tank programme, already beset by failures, had engendered adverse health effects among the troops trialing the hardware.
Quin said that while 121 personnel had previously been identified as requiring urgent hearing assessments, that number had now risen by a further 189, bringing the total to 310. In June, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) halted trials of the Army’s new armoured vehicle amid complaints that the noise of the tanks was impacting the health of troops.
He said that 248 of the 310 had already been tested and the MoD was in the process of determining the extent of the damage caused. Six personnel who had recently left the service were also being traced. A report on the issue is being compiled by the department’s director of health and safety.
“While the report has not yet been concluded, it is apparent that vibration concerns were raised before Ajax trials commenced at the Armoured Trials and Development Unit in November 2019,” Quin said.
He said that he expects a key theme of the report to be “the importance of having a culture that gives safety equal status alongside cost and schedule.” Quin added that they would fully support veterans who have been exposed to noise or vibration on this project in getting the care they needed.
While design changes are being assessed to address vibrations and noise concerns, the minister said it was only part of the solution, and “considerable work needs to be undertaken before any such assurances can be given.”
Britain signed a contract for 589 of the problematic General Dynamics tanks in 2014, with the programme cost reaching £5.5 billion. The vehicles are assembled at the US firm’s Merthyr Tydfil plant.
Earlier reports also suggested the tanks can’t fire on the move due to the vibrations. Trials are expected to resume imminently. “We will not accept a vehicle that is not fit for purpose,”Quin added.
Developed by General Dynamics, the Ajax armoured fighting vehicle impressed then-Prime Minister David Cameron so much that he ordered 589 of them in 2014, after receiving the Army’s go-ahead four years earlier.Delivery dates have since been missed, and the Army is still waiting to roll out the vehicles, but a Times report on Sunday revealed that technical experts have encountered numerous “safety issues,” including excessive noise inside the vehicles, and cannons that can’t fire while on the move due to vibration.
Armed with 40mm cannons and light machine guns, the Ajax vehicles are lighter and more maneuverable than Britain’s aging main battle tank, the Challenger 2. As such, an inability to fire while moving renders the vehicles useless to the reconnaissance units that would eventually use them in the field.
Nevertheless, the British government has handed over more than £3.2 billion for the vehicles, out of a total programme cost of £5.5 billion, according to Ministry of Defence documents seen by the Times. The most recent round of payments, adding up to nearly £600 million, were made this year.
Government spending watchdogs are apparently unhappy, and one of the Times’ sources suggested that payments are not linked to the delivery of working vehicles. If so, General Dynamics has thus far earned a sizeable chunk of change from the UK's defence coffers without delivering a working product.
The Ajax was conceived to replace the obsolete 1970s-era Scimitar light tanks currently used by armoured reconnaissance units, yet the future of such vehicles was uncertain even before the latest issues with the Ajax emerged. When Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled a massive hike in defence expenditure last year, he said that the government’s spending would “be focused on the technologies that will revolutionize warfare,” including a heavy investment in artificial intelligence and the creation of an RAF Space Command, capable of launching a rocket from Scotland in 2022.
However, a parliamentary committee in March excoriated the government for neglecting Britain’s conventional forces, drawing attention to the “deplorable” state of Her Majesty’s armored vehicle capability. Their report heavily criticized the cost and delays involved with the Ajax program, including the vibration issue that Defence Secretary Ben Wallace referred to late last year as “a slight pause in the area around the turret.”
“Of the vehicles we do still have, some date back to the early 1960s, when the Morris 1100 was the most popular car and Elvis was the Christmas number one,” committee chairman Tobias Ellwood said at the time. “A mixture of bureaucratic procrastination, military indecision, financial mismanagement and general ineptitude has led to a severe and sustained erosion of our military capabilities.”
Yet the Ajax boondoggle is not the first incidence of mismanagement at the MoD.
When the Ministry of Defence replaced the FN FAL with the Enfield SA80 as its service rifle in the late 1980s, problems soon emerged. The weapon would jam, its metal components would rust and deform, and it proved wholly unusable in desert environments – which became apparent when British soldiers took part in the Gulf War. After a post-war report identifying these faults leaked to the press, the ministry first pretended the report was fake, before embarking on a costly upgrade programme.
More recently, the ministry has been slammed for spending so much money on its two new ‘Queen Elizabeth’ class aircraft carriers that it couldn’t afford the planes and support vessels needed to deploy them for a year, and couldn’t modify the ships to perform amphibious landings – one of their selling points.
Furthermore, the American F-35 fighter jets that these carriers would launch have been plagued by delays, design flaws and cost overruns, to the point where the ministry has refused to say whether it will buy its original order of 138 F-35s, and declined to offer a cost estimate for the programme as a whole. The 48 jets already ordered are estimated to run up a bill of £9.1 billion by 2025, and the government has not commented on whether upgrade costs will drive that figure up further.
An alleged cache of email exchanges between EU officials and the European Medicines Agency show that the drug regulator was uncomfortable about fast-tracking approval for the Pfizer and Moderna Covid jabs, Le Monde has reported.
The EMA has claimed that the contents of the messages, which were obtained by hackers and published on the dark web, were tampered with in order to undermine confidence in the drugs, without providing further details. However, the agency acknowledged to the French newspaper that the correspondences reflect “issues and discussions” that took place in the lead-up to the decision to grant approval to the vaccines. The agency said it can’t specify which documents are genuine.
Some of the “discussions” appear to have been less than congenial. For example, in a document dated November 19, a senior EMA official described a “rather tense, sometimes even a little unpleasant” conference call with the European Commission regarding the review process for the drugs. The official said he felt there was a clear “expectation” that the vaccines would be approved. A day later, the same individual had an exchange with the Danish Medicines Agency in which he expressed surprise that Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, had announced that the Moderna and Pfizer jabs could receive the green light before the end of the year.
“There are still problems with both,” the unnamed EMA official noted in the leaked correspondence.
According to Le Monde, the hacked documents primarily detail issues that the EMA had with the Pfizer/BioNTech drug. The regulator apparently had three “major issues” with the vaccine:
certain manufacturing sites used for its production had not yet been inspected,
data on batches produced for commercial use were still missing, and, most importantly,
available data revealed qualitative differences between the commercial batches and those used during clinical trials.
The EMA expressed particular concern about the last point, noting that mass production had decreased the purity of the RNA contained in the vaccine. The Pfizer jab uses a mRNA strand, a sequence of molecules that tell cells what to ‘build’ in order to produce a disease-specific antigen.
The EU drug regulator signaled that it was worried that less rigorous manufacturing methods would make the vaccine less effective and safe. However, Pfizer appears to have agreed to make necessary adjustments in order to meet the EMA’s standards.
Which is possibly what they are doing now, now that horror stories are beginning to emerge. They could be making up for batches of vaccine that had to be thrown out because of quality issues.
Despite its hesitancy, it appears the EMA understood that it was under a clear deadline. In an email exchange between colleagues at the agency, one employee said the EMA needs to “accelerate the process to align [with other agencies],” and risks facing “questions and criticisms” from Brussels, the media and the general public if it did not fast-track approval.
The Pfizer jab was granted approval by the EU on December 21, while the Moderna variant was given the go-ahead earlier this month. Since then, numerous reports have emerged of both drugs being linked to adverse effects in countries around the world, prompting investigations by health authorities.
California halts injections of Moderna Covid vaccine batch
due to ‘higher-than-usual number of adverse events’
California health officials are asking vaccine providers to stop administering a batch of Moderna’s Covid-19 jab, after an unusually high number of adverse reactions were linked to the drug.
Doses from Moderna Lot 041L20A are suspected of causing a “higher-than-usual number of adverse events” and should be shelved until a proper investigation can be conducted, the California Department of Public Health said on Sunday.
State epidemiologist Dr. Erica S. Pan said in a statement that “fewer than 10 individuals” suffered “a possible severe allergic reaction” and required medical attention over the past 24 hours after being injected with the specific batch of vaccine. All of the incidents appear to have occurred at a single community clinic that was administering the lot. The site reportedly closed for several hours after the string of adverse reactions occurred, before switching to a different batch of the drug.
It seems quality control issues are not restricted to Pfizer.
“Out of an extreme abundance of caution and also recognizing the extremely limited supply of vaccine, we are recommending that providers use other available vaccine inventory,” the health official said.
More than 330,000 doses from the same Moderna vaccine batch have been distributed to 287 providers across the state, but this is the first time that health authorities have received reports detailing adverse reactions associated with the lot, according to Pan.
While acknowledging that “less data exists on adverse reactions related to the Moderna vaccine,” the state epidemiologist said that it’s rare for vaccines to trigger serious side effects.
Moderna, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are reviewing the batch and all relevant medical data.
The Covid-19 jab has been linked to other cases of serious medical emergencies. In December, a physician in Boston said he suffered one of the worst allergic reactions he’s ever experienced after receiving Moderna’s vaccine, describing the episode as potentially life-threatening.
Similar cases linked to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine have been referred to the CDC and FDA for review.
by JAMES DELINGPOLE A German professor has confirmed what skeptics from Britain to the US have long suspected: that NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies has largely invented “global warming” by tampering with the raw temperature data records.
Professor Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert is a retired geologist and data computation expert. He has painstakingly examined and tabulated all NASA GISS’s temperature data series, taken from 1153 stations and going back to 1881. His conclusion: that if you look at the raw data, as opposed to NASA’s revisions, you’ll find that since 1940 the planet has been cooling, not warming.
According to Günter Ederer, the German journalist who has reported on Ewert’s findings:
From the publicly available data, Ewert made an unbelievable discovery: Between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered so that they showed a significant warming, especially after 1950. […] A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own datasets so that especially after WWII a clear warming appears – although it never existed. Apart from Australia, the planet has in fact been on a cooling trend: Using the NASA data from 2010 the surface temperature globally from 1940 until today has fallen by 1.110°C, and since 2000 it has fallen 0.4223°C […]. The cooling has hit every continent except for Australia, which warmed by 0.6339°C since 2000. The figures for Europe: From 1940 to 2010, using the data from 2010, there was a cooling of 0.5465°C and a cooling of 0.3739°C since 2000.
But the activist scientists at NASA GISS – initially led by James Hansen (pictured above), later by Gavin Schmidt – wanted the records they are in charge of maintaining to show warming not cooling, so they began systematically adjusting the data for various spurious reasons using ten different methods.
The most commonly used ones were: • Reducing the annual mean in the early phase. • Reducing the high values in the first warming phase. • Increasing individual values during the second warming phase. • Suppression of the second cooling phase starting in 1995. • Shortening the early decades of the datasets. • With the long-term datasets, even the first century was shortened. It just happens that for 13 years I was responsible for quality controlling climate data for British Columbia and the Yukon. That stopped abruptly in 2008. They no longer wanted QC done by experienced professionals. It is all done by computers now.
Ewert’s findings echo that of US meteorologists Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts who examined 6,000 NASA weather stations and found a host of irregularities both with the way they were sited and how the raw data had been adjusted to reflect such influences as the Urban Heat Island effect.
Curious. The heat island effect results in raising temperatures in cities. Adjusting for it would mean lowering the temperatures which is counter to what they are accusing NASA of doing. Of course, there is some wiggle room in how much those adjustments are. As you can probably tell, I am convinced of the conspiracy to blame global warming on anthropogenic sources, but I'm not convinced that the scheme goes this far. Common sense dictates that the planet is warming if only by observing the dramatic increase in intensities of various storms. Hurricanes seem to be more intense; even local thunderstorms are at times far more intense than in the past. I have documented that fact myself in British Columbia. Both intensity increases almost certainly have to do with warming temperatures.
Britain’s Paul Homewood is also on NASA GISS’s case. Here he shows the shocking extent of the adjustments they have made to a temperature record in Brazil which has been altered so that a cooling trend becomes a warming trend.
Unadjusted temperature record: shows cooling trend.
Adjusted temperature record: shows warming trend.
For still more evidence of NASA’s adjustments, check out Alterations to Climate Data at Tony Heller’s Real Climate Science.
