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Regulatory Capture Is Hazardous to Your Health

What happens when corporations convince the government to cede its regulatory authority and let corporations oversee themselves?

Planes revolt against their pilots, and people die:

As Boeing hustled in 2015 to catch up to Airbus and certify its new 737 MAX, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) managers pushed the agency’s safety engineers to delegate safety assessments to Boeing itself, and to speedily approve the resulting analysis.

But the original safety analysis that Boeing delivered to the FAA for a new flight control system on the MAX — a report used to certify the plane as safe to fly — had several crucial flaws.

…The safety analysis:

  • Understated the power of the new flight control system, which was designed to swivel the horizontal tail to push the nose of the plane down to avert a stall. When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document.
  • Failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane’s nose downward.
  • Assessed a failure of the system as one level below “catastrophic.” But even that “hazardous” danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor — and yet that’s how it was designed [Dominic Gates, “Flawed Analysis, Failed Oversight: How Boeing, FAA Certified the Suspect 737 MAX Flight Control System,” Seattle Times, updated 2019.03.18].

Two Boeing planes have killed 346 people. Those people died because Boeing lied to all of us, and the government didn’t check to see if Boeing was lying.

The market does not respect human life or human rights. We cannot trust corporations to regulate themselves. Government regulation of the market and the separation of corporate power from government power are vital to human safety.

14 Comments

  1. jerry 2019-03-18 19:23

    Poor old Elaine Chao had to ride one of these flying coffins to show how safe they are. I’ll bet Mitch put some serious looks at her life insurance policy to make sure all was well. We need to face it, Boeing is so corrupted they should move a plant here to South Dakota. We taxpayers are tossing money at Boeing like there is no tomorrow and it’s gotta stop. They pay a million bucks to trump and get 10 billion in return of taxpayer money for crap that is broken.

    All of this because Airbus is coming out with new competition, so they took the old plane design and stuck a heavier motor on it. Any farmer in the country can tell you that when you do that to your old jalopy, your gonna have to make some serious adjustments to carry and disperse the weight or your gonna break down.

    In the meantime, check out this beauty queen from China called the C919. Yup, she is built and ready to take on the flying coffin from Boeing and the new Airbus. Please, let’s elect Democrats to take the stank out of Washington and beyond.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=n6ZGYAJrflE

  2. Roger Cornelius 2019-03-18 21:38

    Don’t forget, jerry, that the “Acting” Secretary of Defense is a Boeing executive.

  3. jerry 2019-03-18 22:48

    Exactly Roger, corporate Amerika has got to go. The greed and the infiltration of crooks in government, is exactly what trump said he was against. Remember the turd said he was gonna drain the swamp. Instead, the trump swamp has become a cesspool.

  4. Debbo 2019-03-18 23:56

    It’s sickening. Boeing should be sued out of existence. It’s yet another investigation for the House. How many palms did Boeing grease? Chao is no doubt as filthy as her husband in all this. She probably made out really $$$$ well.

  5. cibvet 2019-03-19 00:54

    Boeing can’t be sued out of existence. Like all corporations, they declare bankruptcy, change their name, pay off the politicians and keep on truckin.

  6. marvin kammerer 2019-03-19 09:56

    the importance of the FAA has been according to my info has been beyond TRUMP who has not appointed anyone to lead this outfit.granted,it would probably not have made any difference knowing TRUMPS record in these matters.

  7. John 2019-03-19 19:56

    Boeing. And that friends, is why one doesn’t invest in airlines. And if one does, then use tight stops. The sky is the limit until it isn’t.

  8. jerry 2019-03-19 20:22

    The United States cannot be trusted to examine the Boeing “black boxes” so Ethiopia has decided to use the French investigative teams. My, how we have fallen since trump and the republican lackey’s have corrupted it all. We used to stand for something, now we stand for who pays the government the most in corruption from corporate Amerika.

    “PARIS/ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Investigators in France took possession of the crashed Ethiopian Airlines jet’s black boxes on Thursday, seeking clues into a disaster that has grounded Boeing’s global 737 MAX fleet and left scores of families mourning and angry.”
    https://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFKCN1QV1YZ-OZATP

  9. Debbo 2019-03-19 20:49

    Jerry, it’s another clear sign of what a waste of humanity Frantic Flaccid Fool is.

  10. jerry 2019-03-19 22:09

    Our oversight has gone to the highest bidder so the rest of the world is moving on it’s own.

    “Canada, which ground the aircraft before the US, said it would independently certify the 737 Max in the future, rather than accepting FAA validation.

    The FAA declined to comment on individual actions by Canada and the EU, but said in a statement that “the current, historic aviation safety record in the US and globally is achieved through the FAA’s robust processes and full collaboration with the aviation community”.

    The two crashes killed 346 people. While there is no conclusive evidence so far that they are linked, French experts analysing the Ethiopian Airlines’ flight data black box say early investigations point to “clear similarities”.

    Experts believe a new automated system in Boeing’s aircraft – intended to stop stalling by dipping the nose – may have played a role in both crashes, with pilots unable to override it.

    Boeing said in a statement that it would fully cooperate with the inspector general’s review.”

    For Boeing, to know full well the danger and then keeping it from the manuals and the pilots flying these coffins, should be criminally charged. But then, even so, Mannafort proved that white collar crime is not a big deal, kind of a catch and release.

  11. jerry 2019-03-19 22:17

    Now trump and his merry men want to make Brazil a NATO country. This is the same NATO that the dumbass wants to get rid of in Europe. What could go wrong with hazardous inventory? I dunno, maybe something like what just happened.

    “https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/20/brazilian-drug-gang-opens-fire-on-convoy-of-trucks-carrying-nuclear-fuel

  12. jerry 2019-03-19 23:52

    2 day old out of control chemical fire…air quality…not a problem. Only in corporate Amerika can you feel safe while the world around you, chemically burns.

    “HOUSTON — Officials said Tuesday they’re not sure when a two-day-old fire at a Houston-area petrochemical storage facility will burn itself out, but they expressed confidence that the air quality is safe despite huge plumes of smoke.

    Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said at a news conference that monitors show the levels of contaminants in the air are safe and that the plume coming from the site in Deer Park, southeast of Houston, is reaching at least 4,000 feet and staying high enough that the air quality at ground level is safe.” Washington Post March 19, 2019

    Nothing to see or smell here…cough cough..move along. Regulators?? who needs them?

  13. Debbo 2019-03-20 00:53

    “the current, historic aviation safety record in the US and globally is achieved through the FAA’s robust processes and full collaboration with the aviation community”.

    That’s the only funny thing that’s come from the Boeing/FAA debacle.

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