One benefit the Department of Transportation has going for it is that with all the incompetence being displayed at the Defense Department, the Education Department, and Homeland Security, the fact that the Transportation Department’s DEI Secretary Buttigieg is habitually asleep at the switch doesn’t get as much attention as it might otherwise.
One would think that if there was any plane on earth that passengers should feel absolutely safe flying on, it would be Boeing’s 737 Max. Both the company and the FAA were found negligent, liable and villainous following investigations of a pair of fatal crashes of the aircraft shortly after the model’s introduction. A Lion Air MAX plane crashed in Indonesia in October 2018, killing all 189 people aboard, followed by the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines MAX killing all 157 people on that flight. Once the fleets of the Max were permitted to fly again, it was natural to assume that these planes would be scrutinized, double-checked, checked again and then checked again, because another incident would cause Boeing to lose investors’ trust and the FAA to look like irredeemable fools.
Nevertheless, on an Alaska Airlines flight that was at 16,000 feet and climbing to cruising altitude after departing Portland, a plug door panel blew off mid-flight causing the cabin to depressurize. The plane returned safely to Portland with no serious injuries reported, but that is just moral luck.
Alaska Airlines and United Airlines, the two U.S. air carriers that use the 737 MAX 9, then grounded their fleets to inspect their aircraft while the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and National Transportation Safety Board carried out their investigation. Hundreds of flights were canceled. But before this latest 737 Max incident, in late December 2023, Boeing and the FAA sent a warning to 737 MAX operators to inspect their aircraft for loose bolts that could cause its rudder control system to fail. Loose bolts were indeed found on some aircraft, but apparently at least one of them was missed.
I wouldn’t fly on a 738 Max before this—watch last year’s documentary “Flight/Risk,”—and I’m definitely not getting on one of those things after this. The Alaska Airlines incident caused Boeing’s stock price to fall over 8% during yesterday to a one-month low. Good! Better that the stock fall than an airplane. Yet despite all the concerns revived by the latest 737 MAX incident, Boeing still says the aircraft remains a central part of its business.
Well, we’ll see about that. Maybe if the President gets serious and appoints a competent Transportation Secretary who actually knows something about transportation, I may consider giving Boeing….What am I saying? The company can’t be trusted, and Biden won’t fire anybody, because whoever he appointed was “historic” somehow, and that’s what really matters.
Get a horse.
Ethics Alarms 
When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar….
That was an old Yakov Smirnoff joke!
I like the get a horse closing.
I use to enjoy flying however I understood that my safety was based on a cost calculation. TWA800 in 1996 was proof of that. During the Vietnam war the Airforce had informed the airlines of the dangers of not implementing an inert gas system, however the cost was not worth the benefit. Sadly the cost is still not sufficient.
I have avoided flying ever since we had children and still only fly when absolutely necessary. I know flying is safer than driving. However given corporate greed, lowered DEI Pilot standards and having been on a flight that lost power, living through the experience of dropping from the sky below cloud cover, I will only flu if there are no other options.
It isn’t just the pilot standards, under Obama, the Air Traffic Control schools were told only to recruit completely unlikely candidates for ‘diversity’. Having a pilot’s license, an engineering degree, or military traffic control experience counted less than being unemployed. They substituted a cognitive ability test for a ‘biographical questionnaire”. Only those who ‘passed’ the questionnaire were eligible to apply.
https://manhattan.institute/article/affirmative-action-lands-in-the-air-traffic-control-tower
Wow, thank you for sharing that it is way worse than I thought! And I thought I stayed current with these events!! Sadly since we no longer live in a Meritocracy there is little hope for things to improve. The blind leading the blind comes to mind, worse we are in an emperors new clothes situation except the half the population is naked and the government is complementing their new clothes!
https://babylonbee.com/news/alaska-adds-new-scenic-view-seat-for-30-upgrade-fee
Why the 737 Max isn’t already in the Arizona boneyards baking in the heat is beyond me. I’m with you, I’ll never be a passenger on one of those…ever. Rapid decompression would probably cause me heart failure.
Of course, I’m one of those people that hates flying anyways. I have flown numerous times, but it’s been something I’ve merely endured and never enjoyed. In fact, my flights have historically consisted of waiting until we take off and the pilot tells us how long until we’ll be landing, then counting down the minutes one second at a time under my breath. I’m not making that up, that’s what I do…sit in my chair and count seconds, not looking at a phone or watch or anything…one…two…three…
I think we’re all friends here so I can share, but I don’t just brag about that to anyone.
After listening from a presentation from an aerospace executive, it is probably more frightening than you imagine. The presentation basically said that we aren’t graduating enough engineers to allow them to develop their products anymore. They are working on ways to develop products with fewer engineers than ever before. In addition, they have made everything so complicated that no one person can keep track of a project Add to this the fact that the educational standards have dropped for engineers, so they are more specialized than ever before, with few people who can understand much beyond their little part of a project. Add to this the political standards in the workforce, with more conservative engineers being forced out by DEI/pronoun/vaccination mandates.
What could go wrong.
Oh, Baltimore has 11 high schools without a single student proficient in math (the lowest passing grade on their standardized tests with 4 scoring levels). At their best 5 high schools (magnet schools), only 11% are proficient. It appears that not a single high school student in Baltimore scored at mastery level ( the 4rth and highest level) in math. When asked for comment, the school district defended the results by stating that they were better than last year. These are the people designing and building your planes in 5-10 years.
So…the plan is to save the planet through the elimination of air travel by educating people so poorly that they’re too stupid to build a plane that will fly. At least that appears to be Baltimore’s contribution.
Got it…
The Baltimore news is just recent, but the same results are being seen nationwide. Today’s students are not well prepared to handle the knowledge of programs from just a few decades ago. To keep their revenue stream, colleges have responded by reducing the requirements. My brother looked at his alma mater’s engineering program and found that his senior year classes were moved to the Master’s level and then to the Ph.D. level of study. My brother is in his 40’s and he was hired by his company when he was 24. He was the last young engineer his company has been able to hire and keep. All the others were fired within a year. The company has resorted to pilfering older engineers from other companies. His company probably won’t be able to survive much longer as the capable engineers retire.
We are making our systems more complicated and we are graduating few people capable of understanding them. We are becoming a Star Trek trope.
But wait, there is more to the story.
From a WSJ story this evening, when that door plug blew out and the plane depressurized — apparently the cockpit door flew open, subjecting the pilots to all the noise and mayhem going on in the passenger area. Not only did it blow open, but it got stuck on the lavatory door making it super hard to close again. And as an extra added benefit, some of the crew’s checklists flew out of the cockpit because of the sudden draft.
Apparently it was much more chaotic in the cockpit than previously thought, making it harder for the crew to recover and fly the plane safely down to earth.
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The best part of this? Boeing intended for this to happen. The cockpit door opening during a depressurization was a designed in feature. Unfortunately they neglected to put it into the manual and the pilots (and airlines) were unaware of this little enhancement.
Don’t know if NTSB was aware of this — they should have been — but apparently the corresponding European authority was.
Of course, now that this is public knowledge, they’ll need to rethink it. Obviously if a terrorist knew they could get to the cockpit by blowing a hole in the side of the plane…..
“Regulators determined that the risk of bad actors successfully breaching the cockpit under those conditions posed a reasonably small risk to flight safety.”
At least, as long as no one knew about it.
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Sheesh.
I’m sure they had technical reasons for this ‘feature’, but still. Did they not think that having the cockpit door blow out might possibly generate just a wee small risk of the pilot doing something untoward?
It took just one high profile crash of a Fokker Trimotor to kill all wood built airliners in America. Unfortunately for airline passengers today, it might take the death of another All American for needed changes to occur. I wouldn’t be surprised if the 737 Max turned out to be as big a scam as the Christmas Bullet.
In other Boeing airliners, there are small panels in the cockpit door that are designed to blow out in case of a rapid decompression. The panels are too small for someone to climb through and also slow the speed of decompression in the cockpit to prevent things like checklists from being blown out.
Like the MCAS that led to the MAX crashes, this change from the standard 737 type was not disclosed to pilots nor was it in the operator’s manual.
The panel that blew out on the Alaska flight was actually an emergency exit door that is not required on the MAX 9 that is required in the MAX 10. (The number of emergency exits required are based upon the seating capacity of the aircraft.)
I can’t predict what Boeing, the FAA, & the airlines will do about this modular type of fuselage construction, but I think it would make the most sense for these panels to be changed out to operable emergency exits. A row of seats would be lost, but a complete redesign of the panel would be more costly.
One of the selling points for these 737 aircraft is a common type rating, meaning training and simulator time is minimal for pilots already holding a 737 certificate.
In the fifty years of the 737, quite a bit has changed and it is a much different aircraft that uses software to make the MAX behave in a way that is barely distinguishable from the 737 of the sixties.
Someone really fucked up when it came to MCAS on the MAX. For anyone not familiar, MCAS stands for Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System. The software allowed tremendous authority over the elevator. If an angle of attack (AOA) sensor malfunctions, MCAS interprets this as an aerodynamic stall. Standard stall recovery is to push the nose down, which MCAS did, commanding an extreme 10° nose down. If the pilots don’t figure out the AoA failure, MCAS keeps commanding 10° down.
Eventually, you run out of altitude.
Interestingly, the 767 is also equipped with a type of MCAS, but with much less authority, only commanding 3° nose down. The MCAS in the 767 is fully explained in the operator’s manual & has a corresponding checklist.
You know it’s one thing to put ‘clever’ features like these in your aircraft.
But they are really not something you’d think ought to be a secret from the people who have to fly the dang things.