1013 Ralph Nader Letter to Dennis A. Muilenburg, CEO of Boeing

Ralph Nader Letter to Dennis A. Muilenburg, CEO of Boeing

Newsletter published on April 30, 2019

(1) Ralph Nader Letter to Dennis A. Muilenburg, CEO of Boeing
(2) Boeing management errors: offshoring, divorcing engineering from
R&D, shareholder capitalism
(3) Pierre Spray is right about F35 'turkey'; and it's vulnerable to
Hacking of its Software
(4) F35's 6 million lines of software cf F-22's 2 million lines
(5) Boeing Dreamliner South Carolina factory reports are "from union
members"

(1) Ralph Nader Letter to Dennis A. Muilenburg, CEO of Boeing

https://nader.org/2019/04/25/a-letter-to-dennis-a-muilenburg-ceo-of-boeing/

Letter to Dennis A. Muilenburg, CEO of Boeing
By Ralph Nader
April 25, 2019

Dennis A. Muilenburg
Chairman, President and
Chief Executive Officer
The Boeing Company
100 North Riverside
Chicago, IL 60606

Dear Mr. Muilenburg:

OnApril 4, 2019 you somewhat belatedly released a statement that "We at
Boeing are sorry for the lives lost in the recent 737 MAX accidents.
These tragedies continue to weigh heavily on our hearts and minds…." You
added that a preliminary investigation made it "apparent that in both
flights" the MCAS "activated in response to erroneous angle of attack
information."

These and other remarks reflect years of mismanagement by Boeing
executives, now tragically bearing bitter fruit. Your acknowledgement of
the problems with the 737 MAX somehow escaped inclusion in your messages
to shareholders, the capital markets and the Securities and Exchange
Commission. It is now stunningly clear that your overly optimistic
outlook on January 20, 2019 – after the Indonesian Lion Air crash – was
misleading. Whatever the public learns, day after day about the troubles
of your company, it is still far less than what Boeing knows will come
out day by day, and not just about the deadly design of the 737 MAX.

Your narrow-body passenger aircraft – namely, the long series of 737’s
that began in the nineteen sixties was past its prime. How long could
Boeing avoid making the investment needed to produce a "clean-sheet"
aircraft and, instead, in the words of Bloomberg Businessweek "push an
aging design beyond its limits?" Answer: As long as Boeing could get
away with it and keep necessary pilot training and other costs low for
the airlines as a sales incentive.

Boeing kept on this track until the competition from its only
competitor, Airbus, came along with its A320neo. The year 2011 was a
crucial period for the company. Top management was into preliminary work
on a new aircraft and then panicked over Airbus’s success. To compete
with Airbus, Boeing equipped the 737 MAX with larger engines tilted more
forward and upward on the wings than prior 737’s. Thus began the trail
of criminal negligence that will implicate the company and its
executives. The larger engines changed the center of gravity and the
plane’s aerodynamics. Boeing management was on a fast track and ignored
warnings by its own engineers, not to mention scores of other technical
aerospace people outside the company. The Maneuvering Characteristics
Augmentation System (MCAS) software fix or patch with all its glitches
and miscues is now a historic example of a grave failure of Boeing
management. Yet, you insist the 737 MAX is still safe and some
alteration of the MCAS and other pilot advisories will make the aircraft
airworthy. Aircraft should be stall-proof, not stall-prone. Trying to
shift the burden onto the pilots for any vast numbers of failure modes
beyond the software’s predictability is scurrilous. Deplorably you are
still pushing to end the grounding for the 737 MAX and resume delivery
of nearly 5000 orders worldwide. The Boeing 737 MAX must never be
permitted to fly again – it has an inherent aerodynamic design defect.

No matter your previous safety record of the 737 series, Boeing doesn’t
get one, two or more crashes that are preventable by adopting
long-established aeronautical knowledge and practices. You are on the
highest level of notice not to add to your already extraordinary record
of criminally negligent decisions and inactions. Result – 346 innocent
people lost their lives.

A reckless salesman, driving dangerously to reach a customer and close a
deal, causing a collision and death of a family in another motor
vehicle, does not get to be exonerated from a manslaughter prosecution
by saying he has a 25 year good driving record.

Boeing management’s behavior must be seen in the context of Boeing’s use
of its earned capital. Did you use the $30 billion surplus from 2009 to
2017 to reinvest in R&D, in new narrow-body passenger aircraft?  Or did
you, instead, essentially burn this surplus with self-serving stock
buybacks of $30 billion in that period? Boeing is one of the companies
that MarketWatch labelled as "Five companies that spent lavishly on
stock buybacks while pension funding lagged."

Incredibly, your buybacks of $9.24 billion in 2017 comprised 109% of
annual earnings. As you well know, stock buybacks do not create any
jobs. They improve the metrics for the executive compensation packages
of top Boeing bosses. Undeterred, in 2018, buybacks of $9 billion
constituted 86% of annual earnings.

To make your management recklessly worse, in December 2018, you arranged
for your rubberstamp Board of Directors to approve $20 billion more in
buybacks. Apparently, you had amortized the cost of the Indonesian Lion
Air crash victims as not providing any significant impact on your future
guidance to the investor world.

Then came the second software-bomb that took away control from the
pilots and brought down Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10,
taking the lives of 156 passengers and crew. At the time, you were way
overdue with your new software allegedly addressing the avoidable risks
associated with the notorious 737 MAX.

Don’t you see some inverted priorities here? Don’t you see how you
should have invested in producing better aircraft, if you wished to
compete with Airbus, whose engineers were allowed to do their job and
avoid design instabilities? Instead, your top management was inebriated
with the prospect of higher stock values, through stock buybacks and
higher profits by keeping your costs lower with that "aging design" of
the Boeing 737s. It now is apparent that you guessed wrong – big time
for your passengers as well as for your company and its shareholders.

Boeing is in additional trouble that reflects poor management. On March
22, 2019, the Washington Post reported that NASA’s Administrator, Jim
Bridenstine said "the agency is considering sidelining the massive
rocket Boeing is building because of how far behind schedule it is."

According to a second Washington Post, March 22, 2019 article, the delay
in the "scheduled maiden launch in June 2020" and the "billions of
dollars over budget" had NASA’s leaders in a fury. Last year, NASA’s
inspector general excoriated your company, revealing it has already
spent over $5 billion and is "expected to burn through the remaining
money by early this year (2019), three years too soon, without
delivering a single rocket stage," wrote the Post.

On March 13, 2019, Bridenstine said "although NASA still steadfastly
supports the massive rocket, known as the Space Launch System (SLS), the
agency would consider sidelining it and instead using commercially
available rockets for the mission known as Exploration Mission-1
(EM-1)." This announcement before the Senate Commerce, Science and
Transportation Committee "set off shock waves… a major blow to NASA’s
flagship rocket program and its main contractor, Boeing."

And now, the agency is about to announce another major delay in the
high-profile spacecraft Boeing is building to fly astronauts to the
International Space Station.

On March 28, 2019, the World Trade Organization (WTO) after 14 years,
issued a final ruling that Boeing received an illegal U.S. tax break
from the state of Washington in prohibited subsidies under international
trade rules. Boeing has long been a recipient of various kinds of
extensive corporate welfare before and after it became a U.S. monopoly.

Then on April 21, 2019, the New York Times in a lengthy front-page
story, based on "internal emails, corporate documents and federal
records, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former
employees," reported that your South Carolina factory, which produces
the 787 Dreamliner, "has been plagued by shoddy production and weak
oversight that have threatened to compromise safety." These problems
have persisted notwithstanding two documentaries, commencing in 2013,
produced by Al-Jazeera investigators reported similar problems. The Air
Force last month temporarily stopped deliveries of the KC-48 tanker
after finding random objects inside the new planes, causing Will Roper,
Assistant Secretary of the Air Force to exclaim "To say it bluntly, this
is unacceptable."

It is not as if you are receiving anything but top dollar payments for
these civilian and military aircraft. Or, you are underpaid at over $23
million in 2018 which comes to over $12,000 an hour.

In the midst of these accusations, whistleblower lawsuits, alleged
retaliations by management, the Times reports your pace of production
"has quickened" and that you are eliminating "about a hundred quality
control positions in North Charleston [South Carolina]."

Boeing shareholders and your compliant Board of Directors should be
advising you that the scheduled one hour annual shareholder meeting is
not nearly enough time for you to explain these matters to shareholders
in Chicago on April 29, 2019. Big corporations are run like top-down
dictatorships where the hired hands determine their own pay and strip
their shareholder owners of necessary powers of governance. Do not push
this envelope, further. Your Board of Directors should disclose what you
told them about the 737 MAX and when they knew it.

Already, corporate crime specialists are making the case for you and
other top Boeing managers, having refused to listen to the warnings of
your conscientious engineers, regarding the redesign of the 737 MAX, to
face criminal prosecution. Note BP pleading guilty in the Deepwater
Horizon oil spill, to eleven counts of manslaughter in 2013.

Already, the kindly corporate crisis specialists are issuing warnings,
along with the mild ones by the shareholder service firms such as
Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), which urges separation of the
roles of the Chairman of the Board and CEO, both of which you hold.
Further, Glass Lewis urges removal of Boeing audit committee head
Lawrence Kellner for "failing to foresee safety risks with the 737 MAX
aircraft," reported the Financial Times, on April 16, 2019.

Consider, in addition, the statement of two Harvard scholars—Leonard J.
Marcus and Eric J. McNulty, authors of the forthcoming book, You’re It:
Crisis, Change, and How to Lead When it Matters Most. These gentlemen
did not achieve their positions by using strong language. That is why,
the concluding statement in their CNN article on March 27, 2019, merits
your closer attention:

"Of course, if Boeing did not act in good faith in deploying the 737 Max
and the Justice Department’s investigation discovers Boeing cut corners
or attempted to avoid proper regulatory reviews of the modifications to
the aircraft, Muilenburg and any other executives involved should resign
immediately. Too many families, indeed communities, depend on the
continued viability of Boeing."

These preconditions have already been disclosed and are evidentially
based. Your mismanagement is replete with documentation, including your
obsession with shareholder value and executive compensation. There is no
need to wait for some long-drawn out, redundant inquiry. Management was
criminally negligent, 346 lives of passengers and crew were lost. You
and your team should forfeit your compensation and should resign forthwith.

All concerned with aviation safety should have your public response.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

P.O. Box 19312
Washington, DC 20036

(2) Boeing management errors: offshoring, divorcing engineering from
R&D, shareholder capitalism

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/boeing-might-represent-the-greatest-indictment-of-21st-century-capitalism.html

Boeing Might Represent the Greatest Indictment of 21st-Century Capitalism

Posted on April 27, 2019 by Yves Smith

By Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and commentator. Produced by
Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

A veteran commercial pilot and software engineer with over three decades
of experience has just written the most damning account of the recent
Boeing 737 fiasco. At one level, author Gregory Travis has provided us
with the most detailed account of why a particular plane model once
synonymous with reliability became a techno-death trap. But ultimately,
his story is a parable of all that is wrong with 21st-century
capitalism; Boeing has become a company that embodies all of its worst
pathologies. It has a totally unsustainable business model—one that has
persistently ignored the risks of excessive offshoring, the pitfalls of
divorcing engineering from the basic R&D function, the perils of
"demodularization," and the perverse incentives of "shareholder
capitalism," whereby basic safety concerns have repeatedly been
sacrificed at the altar of greed. It’s also a devastating takedown of a
company that once represented the apex of civilian aviation, whose
dominance has been steadily eroded as it has increased its toxic ties to
the U.S. military. In that sense it mirrors the decline of America as a
manufacturing superpower. And finally, it shows a company displaying a
complete loss of human perspective in the "man vs. machine" debate.

Here’s the crux of Travis’s analysis: "Design shortcuts" led to safety
hazards. The newest version of Boeing’s 737 plane, previously known for
its reliability and ease of use, became a high-tech disaster. Machines
overwhelmed man. And worst of all, the aviation industry regulatory
overseer, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), subcontracted the
safety/certification functions to Boeing itself, so there was no early
warning system in place to avert the resultant tragedy.

Travis largely restricts his analysis to the 737. But his article
illustrates pathologies long evident at Boeing and the FAA.

Let’s look at the last problem first: The FAA suffers from reduced
funding from Congress (the Daily Beast reported that "the agency’s 2019
budget actually cut funding for the Aviation Safety Office by 1.7
percent"), and a corresponding loss of aviation expertise, as many of
its top personnel have migrated to the private sector. Of course, that’s
nothing new for the FAA, which has a sad history of hemorrhaging
personnel since the days of the air traffic controllers’
strike/collective dismissal under Reagan (a cost control measure), as
well as embracing neoliberal, supposedly market-based performance
incentives that are thoroughly inappropriate for a regulatory body first
and foremost responsible for flight safety.

Becoming more "industry-friendly" and starved of adequate personnel and
fiscal resources to do its job properly, the FAA has therefore been
forced to delegate much of its regulatory oversight and certification
functions to the airline industry itself ("self-certification") and has
therefore become a case study in "regulatory capture."

Boeing’s failures resonate with the public in a way that no complicated
financial fraud possibly could. It takes a certain level of technical
expertise to understand how the toxicity of a financial derivative poses
dangers to an economic system; but everybody instinctively understands
the tragic impact of a plane crash, like the doomed Lion Air and
Ethiopian Airlines 737-related accidents.

The seeds of Boeing’s destruction arguably were planted well before the
737-related mishaps. The warning signs were already evident in the 787
Dreamliner program a decade ago, which even today continues to be
characterized by repeated engine design flaws and cost overruns. In a
Harvard Business Review article, Professors Gary Pisano and Willy Shih
first highlightedthe perils of Boeing’s embrace of "demodularization":
"[T]he shift from aluminum alloys to carbon-fiber-composite materials
changed things. The old modular design rules could not fully account for
stress transmission and loading at the system level—something that
Boeing did not get right initially."

Boeing couldn’t get it right because the company had shifted large
chunks of its design and manufacturing facilities to disparate parts
around the globe—too far apart geographically, in fact, to monitor
everything properly: "As a result it encountered problems assembling the
pieces (such as the horizontal stabilizer from Alenia Aeronautica in
Italy and the wing box from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan).
Significant redesign and rework were required, and the program suffered
major delays," write Pisano and Shih.

With one part of the plane being manufactured in Italy, and another in
Japan, management was unable to assess quickly the resultant design and
engineering flaws before launch. Even after the initial launch delays
were addressed, Dreamliner’s history has been characterized by repeated
recallsand cost overruns.

Offshoring, of course, is nothing new. In our brave new world of
globalized capitalism, multinational corporations like Boeing are
constantly on the lookout for global labor arbitrage possibilities,
which have the happy effect of curbing unit labor costs, fattening
profit margins, and thereby juicing the company stock price (an
increasingly important part of management compensation, irrespective of
the underlying performance of the company itself in the real world).
These are all part and parcel of the pathologies inherent in America’s
increasingly financialized "shareholder capitalism" (see herefor more
details).

But Boeing’s problems extend beyond that. It is a company that has
historically been very successful in the highly competitive civil
aviation market since the 747 jumbo jet ("the Queen of the skies") first
dominated some 50 years ago. The 21st century has been less kind to the
company, however, as its failures have been increasingly exacerbated by
its growing, and increasingly toxic, ties to the U.S. defense industry.

These links began in the late 1990s when the U.S. Department of Defense
helped to engineer a merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, the latter
an important supplier of combat aircraft to the United States. Far from
being the "largest, strongest, broadest, most admired aerospace
corporation in the world," as promised at the time of the merger by John
McDonnell, chairman of McDonnell Douglas, the corrupting practices of
the Pentagon soon began to infect the newly combined entity. In
particular, the 787’s outsourcing strategy turned out to be a fiasco,
which even then-Boeing CEO Jim Albaugh was forced to concede in a
Seattle Times report.

But the Seattle Times also exposed that the rot took hold well before
the 787 debacle, citing an internal Boeing Report, written in 2001 by
Dr. L.J. Hart-Smith, a mere five years after the merger was consummated.
Hart-Smith described the disastrous economic effects of excessive
outsourcing that began to afflict Boeing almost immediately, especially
as its ties to the military expanded. These problems are elaborated
hereby longtime defense analysts Franklin "Chuck" Spinney and Pierre Sprey:

The so-called spin-offs offs from Defense spending can transmit the
corrupting effects of the politically motivated, cost-plus economics of
the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) into the larger
economy[.] The MICC not only subsidizes wasteful cost growth in the
Pentagon, its activities infect the overall economy by soaking up scarce
investment and human capital; corrupting the practices of science and
engineering; distorting research content on a huge scale; while
providing incentives for inefficient production and management
practices, (e.g. excessive outsourcing for political reasons – aka the
political engineering practices explained hereand here), not to mention
the politicizing of industrial management.

Contact with the Pentagon often signals death for a civilian company
because of the incentives inherent in its "cost-plus" contracts, along
with the geographic disbursement of manufacturing facilities to as many
parts of the country as possible in order to maximize congressional
political support for increasingly expensive military boondoggles—what
Spinney and Sprey term "political engineering." These two factors bias
corporate practices toward inflating costs and therefore foster waste
and diminish safety. By contrast, in a traditional civilian model,
profit margins are best secured by reducing costs as much as possible in
order to maximize the bottom line.

As Boeing’s ties to the military increased, so too did its shoddy
corporate practices. The 787 Dreamliner is still plagued with production
problems, and there is little sign that Boeing has rectified them. The
company has failed to reintegrate basic manufacturing and R&D to correct
the original problems highlighted by Shih and Pisano (quite the
contrary, as the company is increasingly shifting production to China in
order to safeguard its market share there). Just this month, the New
York Times has reported that "the [Charleston, South Carolina-based]
factory, which makes the 787 Dreamliner, has been plagued by shoddy
production and weak oversight that have threatened to compromise
safety." A former quality manager, John Barnett, a whistleblower who
worked at Boeing for nearly three decades, damningly suggested to the
New York Times: "I haven’t seen a plane out of Charleston yet that I’d
put my name on saying it’s safe and airworthy." Recall that Boeing
originally moved some of its operations to the "right to work" state of
South Carolina to undermine the strength of its unionized workforce in
the state of Washington, which has had an adverse effect on the overall
quality of its products.

That’s on top of the recent 737 debacle, where Boeing evidently missed
safety risks in the design of the newer model, "like an anti-stall
system that played a role in both crashes," as the same New York Times
article noted.But the genesis of the problem of the 737, a plane Gregory
Travis (a pilot of 30 years’ standing and a software engineer of 40
years’ experience) writeswas once known for its "reliability" and
relative technological "simplicity," lay in the fact that "market and
technological forces pushed the 737 into ever-larger versions with
increasing electronic and mechanical complexity."

The main problem, notes Travis, was the engine redesign. The engine’s
size was increased to enhance the 737’s overall energy efficiency, but
it became too large to be accommodated in its traditional spot on the
plane. The expansion ultimately necessitated extending the engine up and
well in front of the wing. That changed the relationship between
engine’s "thrust" anditscenter of gravity, which, in the words of
Travis, caused the 737 "to ‘pitch up,’ or raise its nose… a bit too much
for comfort on power application as well as at already-high angles of
attack. It violated that most ancient of aviation canons and probably
violated the certification criteria of the U.S. Federal Aviation
Administration."

"Angle of attack," as Travis defines, refers to the angle between the
wing and the relative wind blowing over it. The more a pilot lifts the
nose of the airplane, the higher the angle of attack and the more the
lift of the wing increases—until you reach the stall limit angle of
attack, when suddenly the wing stops lifting entirely (because the
relative wind’s smooth airflow over the wing has separated
catastrophically from the wing surface). That’s why an airplane that
adds extra "pitch up" force to the nose when the pilot commands just a
slight increase in angle of attack (that is, in nose up angle) is so
dangerously unstable—because it can lead to a fatal stall situation that
likely was the cause of the two crashes.

Egregious violations to basic aerodynamic principles should have induced
the FAA to step in and force a redesign of the Boeing’s latest
incarnation of the 737 (the so-called "Max 8") in order to minimize the
safety risk. But there were two problems:

Making the required hardware modifications would have been hugely
expensive (to the point where Boeing would have had to build an entirely
new aircraft, rather than merely modifying a popular, hitherto safe and
easy-to-fly airplane) As noted above, the FAA was already overwhelmed,
and consequently was beginning to allow Boeing to "self-certify" its own
planes. Rather than design a whole new plane the "solution" to point 1
was the installation of yet more software, in this case the "Maneuvering
Characteristics Augmentation System," or MCAS, for short. The goal,
writes Travis, was to enable the computers to push "the nose of the
plane down when the system thinks the plane might exceed its
angle-of-attack limits; it does so to avoid an aerodynamic stall. Boeing
put MCAS into the 737 Max because the larger engines and their placement
make a stall more likely in a 737 Max than in previous 737 models."
Unfortunately, the MCAS software "solution" was a totally incompetent,
unsafe Band-Aid that used the computer to counter (or perhaps more
correctly, to mask) the airplane’s dangerous tendency to lift the nose
too much and get the stall situation where the computer takes over from
the pilot to resolve a problem that initially stemmed from a hardware issue.

As far as point 2 goes, as Travis describes it:

As airplanes became more complex and the gulf between what the FAA could
pay and what an aircraft manufacturer could pay grew larger, more and
more of those engineers migrated from the public to the private sector.
Soon the FAA had no in-house ability to determine if a particular
airplane’s design and manufacture were safe. So the FAA said to the
airplane manufacturers, "Why don’t you just have your people tell us if
your designs are safe’"

You can immediately spot the parallels between the 2008 global financial
crisis and the Boeing crashes. Much like the FAA with Boeing, in 2008,
our global monetary authorities, regulators and ratings agencies were
starved of adequate resources and expertise to properly scrutinize the
activities of Wall Street’s financial engineers. They were forced to
accept at face value the banks’ mathematically unsound "value at risk"
models to justify the soundness and fundamental safety of their newly
created derivatives on the lines that the underlying asset pricing
followed a "normal" distribution pattern. Of course, these derivatives
did no such thing, because the price history was inadequate to establish
a truly normal pattern; therefore, the math on which risk management was
predicated turned out to be flawed with catastrophic consequences, as
former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan ultimately acknowledged.

Similarly, the MCAS software "solution" that was supposed to "fix" the
engineering problem of the new 737 failed, because it was based on a
flawed paradigm: no computer software can fundamentally repudiate the
principles of aerodynamics. And in both cases, the regulatory capture
and inadequate financial resources accorded to the authority precluded
it from stepping in before disaster struck. Hence, the FAA did not once
highlight the risks of the new anti-stall system when it certified the
"new and improved" 737 Max 8 as airworthy some two years ago, according
to the Washington Post. This is because Boeing had already attested to
the plane’s fundamental fly-worthiness (much as Wall Street’s models
minimized the possibility of a "black swan" discontinuity in the
financial markets, which induced the relevant compliance bodies to green
light them).

Consequently, both Boeing and a multitude of financial institutions
post-2008 suffered "crashes." Note as well in each case how increasing
complexity becomes the enemy of effective regulation and, ultimately,
safety considerations themselves. In both cases, they ignored what
Travis and others call the KISS principle: "Keep it simple, stupid."

There’s another interesting dimension to this Boeing calamity, which
points to the perpetual "man vs. machine" debate that has been the story
of capitalism since the days of the Luddites. Contrary to popular
characterization, the Luddites were not simply technophobes, beating
back the forces of progress. They were highly skilled artisans,
protesting the fact that their livelihood was being displaced by
automation, imposed on and displacing them like expendable commodities
with virtually no consultation from the business owners themselves.

Likewise, in the new Max 8 plane, the new MCAS software was introduced
without letting the pilots know about its main features. The key
characteristic of MCAS is that it is activated without the pilots’
input. Worse still, according to the Verge, "both jets that crashed
lacked safety features that could have provided crucial information to
the crew because they were sold as options by Boeing, according to the
New York Times."

A huge failing of MCAS is that it effectively eliminates the human
"feel" dimension to flying, as Travis illustrates:

In the old days, when cables connected the pilot’s controls to the
flying surfaces, you had to pull up, hard, if the airplane was trimmed
to descend. You had to push, hard, if the airplane was trimmed to
ascend. With computer oversight there is a loss of natural sense in the
controls. In the 737 Max, there is no real ‘natural feel’…

There is only an artificial feel, a feeling that the computer wants the
pilots to feel. And sometimes, it doesn’t feel so great.

When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend, because the MCAS
system thinks it’s about to stall, a set of motors and jacks push the
pilot’s control columns forward. It turns out that the flight management
computer can put a lot of force into that column—indeed, so much force
that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to pull the
column back, trying to tell the computer that this really, really should
not be happening.(Emphasis added.)

The MCAS computer software taxes a pilot beyond his physical capacities.
And while it is true that in modern long haul commercial flying,
computers do most of the actual flying, redundancy is normally built
into the system to enable human beings to override the software if the
pilot spots a problem. What distinguishes the newly incorporated MCAS
system is that it denies the pilot’s ultimate sovereignty or, as the
author starkly puts it: "It denies the pilots the ability to respond to
what’s before their own eyes."

Travis ultimately evokes Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey" to indicate
something of the scale of the technological dysfunction created here by
Boeing: "Raise the nose, HAL." "I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do
that."

The key difference between the two situations is that in Kubrick’s
masterpiece, HAL, the computer, was finally overridden by human action
when circumstances necessitated and was therefore deactivated before
more disaster could strike. The issue implicit in Travis’ imagery in
regard to the Max 8 is that we may have taken this technophilia too far
in the direction of computers to the point where today’s modern day
"HAL" cannot be controlled by the pilot.

Boeing’s pathologies therefore illustrate the perils of innovation for
innovation’s sake. But the company is symptomatic of a much bigger
problem: We lionize the "progress" of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs,
even as they produce self-driving cars (which cause fatal accidents),
multifunctional smart phones (that threaten our privacy), high-tech
drones (that bring airports to a standstill), or any kind of extreme
automation in the workplace that degrades the role of human beings.

The crashes of the Boeing 737 jets ultimately reflect a hubristic faith
in the power of the machine, a factor that is creating its own kind of
dystopian 21st-century nightmare worthy of a Philip K. Dick novel. We
view technology not as a man-made invention designed to help us, but as
an autonomously fixed condition that bears little relation to human
behavior. This lack of integration means that complexity overwhelms us,
rather than enhances our quality of life. It commodifies us. Labor is
just a cost input to be replaced, if possible, by a robot; it is no
longer viewed as a source of demand. The same unthinking mentality that
sees regulators as a dispensable encumbrance who clutter the operations
of "the free market"; or safety is an optional feature that mustn’t be
allowed to interfere with the bottom line; where the needs of employees
are subsidiary to the profits of shareholders and management; and the
military is prioritized over the needs of the civilian economy.

Boeing sadly embodies so much of our current economic and social
dysfunction with predictably deadly consequences. But it is not alone or
unique by any stretch of the imagination.

(3) Pierre Spray is right about F35 'turkey'; and it's vulnerable to
Hacking of its Software

From: JP Desmoulins <jean-pierre.desmoulins@orange.fr>

Hi Peter
Pierre Spray is right : this plane has too wide specifications and can't
compete with other modern planes, except perhaps for this ability to
lift off vertically, which should have given birth to a specific plane,
like was the Harrier. Right also, stealth ability is just a marketing
argument : serbs have proven that when they shot a F117 "stealth" plane.
Worse, the F35 uses a sophisticated maintenance system, each plane being
closely tight to a set of computers (in the country where it is
operated, in the USA) for maintenance purpose. This creates two problem.
The first is that a foreing country (outside the USA) which uses these
planes can suspect that if they want to use them for a purpose which is
not agreed upon by the USA, the planes will stay grounded. The second is
that if a plane crashes in an ennemy territory, or at sea where ennemy
forces can find and retrieve the debris, this software system can be
reversed engineered and thus all the system can be hacked and
compromised, blocking the use of all the F35s of the world, includind
eventually in the USA. Very dangerous situation...
Best regards
Jean-Pierre

(4) F35's 6 million lines of software cf F-22's 2 million lines

From: John Cameron <blackheathbooks@internode.on.net>
Subject: F 35

  Peter, For your discernment.

"Dear Mr. Cameron ... I predict that Australia will find it can not
afford the JSF.  But the real question is why buy it.  What threat
justifies it?.   Certainly not Indonesia.

My guess is that the JSF will be relatively short range (it has weight
problems) and it's 6 million lines of software will make the F-22's
software problems (it has 2 million lines) look like a sunday school
picnic.  The attached paper puts the Jt Strike fighter in a historical
constext, I published it in the Proceeding of the Naval Institute a few
years ago.  Hope it helps ... Chuck Spinney

(5) Boeing Dreamliner South Carolina factory reports are "from union
members"

From: "fja0527@bellsouth.net" <fritza2tt@yahoo.de>
To: "peter@mailstar.net" <peter@mailstar.net>
Subject: Re: Claims of Shoddy Production at Boeing 787 Dreamliner plant
in South Carolina

Peter,
     these are reports from union members! I went through this when I
worked for over 33 years at Eastern Airlines. The unions did not rest
until the company was destroyed. They had taken it upon themselves to
tell Eastern how to run its business, as though the company did not know
what it was doing, that the FAA did not already run herd on Eastern, the
insurance companies did not make sure that they would have to cover
whenever something went wrong and that the pilots were total imbeciles.
I left the union, but the company was still forced to charge and collect
my membership dues.
     So much for unions, and as you showed, they were no different at
Boeing, especially when it came to building the "Dreamliners" with
non-union labor.
     By the way, I just saw that the DOW was down 70 points and Boeing
was up $8.80/share. If the Max problem ever goes to court, the rest of
the story will come out.
     Fritz