Boeing corporation cover-up of lethal aircraft problems

This 18 June 2020 video from the United States Senate says about itself:

Lawmakers rip FAA for not disclosing documents on Boeing 737 MAX

Key senators say the FAA is blocking their attempt to get documents that might explain how the agency approved the Boeing 737 MAX before two deadly crashes.

Translated from Dutch NOS radio today:

‘Boeing did not report crucial modification of 737 MAX to aviation authority’

US American aircraft manufacturer Boeing has not reported an essential modification to the type 737 MAX to aviation regulator FAA. This is evident from research by the United States Department of Transportation, published by the news agencies Reuters and AP.

These are changes to the warning system that automatically pushes the nose of the device down if it rises too quickly. Mainly due to errors in this so-called MCAS system, two planes crashed in Ethiopia and Indonesia in five months, killing 346 people.

The U.S. department has created a timeline of the aircraft’s history, running from the drawing board in 2012 to grounding in March 2019 after the two crashes.

This shows that Boeing initially dismissed the MCAS system as a relatively insignificant system, which would rarely be activated in practice. But in 2016, after the first test flights with the 737 MAX had taken place, the system was modified.

This pushed nose down with more force when the system was turned on. However, this change was never formally communicated to the FAA, so it was not examined by inspectors. …

Survivors of victims have filed lawsuits against the corporation.

US regulator approves re-certification flights for Boeing’s deadly 737 Max. By Bryan Dyne, 30 June 2020.

BOEING 777 GROUNDED AFTER ENGINE FAILURE Boeing told airlines to stop flying the wide-body 777 jet with the type of engine that broke apart over Colorado last week, showering the area with broken parts. United, the only U.S. airline that uses Boeing 777s with the type of Pratt & Whitney engine that failed, grounded its fleet on Sunday. Dramatic footage of United Flight 328 showed the engine of a Boeing 777-200 in flames minutes after it took off from Denver International Airport. [HuffPost]

Lethal planes corporation Boeing gets coronavirus billions

This 1 April 2020 video from the USA says about itself:

Boeing Gets Up To $17 Billion In Loans From Coronavirus Stimulus

Economist Dean Baker explains how the $2.2 trillion stimulus quietly provides up to $17 billion in loans for Boeing with almost no strings attached.

Yet another Boeing scandal

This 19 February 2020 video says about itself:

Boeing finds debris in fuel tanks of 737 Max planes

Boeing is facing more problems with its 737 Max series, which have been grounded for almost a year over safety concerns. Recent inspections have found debris in the fuel tanks of several planes awaiting delivery to airlines. Also today, we look at the latest from talks between French unions and the government over the controversial pension reforms.

Translated from Dutch NOS radio about this today:

It is the umpteenth setback for the 737 MAX, which has been on the ground for almost a year after two aircraft had crashed. In those crashes, in Ethiopia and Indonesia, 346 people died.

It is not entirely clear what the waste material is. Boeing makes no statements about this; according to some media, it is tools that had been left behind during manufacture.

It is also unclear in how many planes the waste was discovered. …

The 737 MAX has long been a worry for Boeing. The fatal crashes were found to be caused by software errors in the operating system. …

Internal documents from the US American corporation showed that staff had long doubted the safety of the 737 MAX. “I would not send my family in a plane the crew of which was trained with a MAX simulator,” an employee was quoted.

Another former Boeing employee told US media and a committee of inquiry in December that staff at the 737 MAX plant were working overtime structurally, while everything was lacking in the workplace. This would have led to errors and unsafe situations.

Banks’ $10 billion to Boeing, nothing to mourning families

This 15 May 2019 ABC TV video from the USA says about itself:

Pilots heard on audio recording pleading with Boeing

American Airline pilot union officials met with Boeing engineers in Dallas after the first 737 Max crash and pushed them to take more action in a heated conversation.

By Bryan Dyne in the USA:

Banks to give $10 billion bailout to Boeing, nothing to the families of the dead

23 January 2020

Airplane manufacturer Boeing has secured at least $6 billion in loans from major banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, and is seeking a further $4 billion, according a report citing internal sources by the financial news channel CNBC.

The company is looking to offset losses estimated at $1 billion a month from two crashes and the resulting grounding of its flagship 737 Max 8 aircraft. The combined death toll from the October 2018 crash of Lion Air Flight 610 and the March 2019 crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 was 346.

Boeing, which posted revenues of $100 billion in 2018, has suffered a sharp fall in income and share value since the grounding of the Max 8 last March. Its stock price has fallen from $440.62 per share on March 1, 2019 to a closing price of $307.15 on Tuesday, wiping out more than $64 billion of the company’s value. The aerospace giant’s sales plummeted from 893 airplanes in 2018 to just 54 in 2019. Its final earnings report for 2019 is expected to be posted on January 29.

It is unclear when or even if the Max 8 will ever fly again. In the 10 months since its grounding, a steady stream of internal leaks, news reports, interviews with former employees and congressional hearings have provided a mountain of evidence pointing to criminal negligence, deadly safety short cuts and concealment of known dangers on the part of Boeing management, facilitated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and top government officials. Yet not a single company executive or regulatory head has been criminally charged, let alone prosecuted and convicted.

These figures have instead been richly rewarded. Ex-CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who was forced from his position in December, walked away from the company with $80.7 million in compensation for overseeing the final development, production and certification of one of the deadliest commercial aircraft ever to fly. Michael Luttig, who until recently was Boeing’s chief legal counsel, last year sold shares worth $6.5 million and was gifted shares currently worth $3.6 million.

Even the loan that is being extended to Boeing is constructed to maximize the company’s profits. It will likely be what is known as a delayed-draw loan, designed to have no immediate impact on the company’s credit rating, unlike loans provided to workers. This will provide Boeing extra capital to pay its investors, including firms such as Vanguard and T. Rowe Price, which have continued to receive dividends on their shares throughout the Max 8 grounding.

Investors are also expecting Boeing to use the funds to help complete its $4 billion acquisition of Embraer, which has plans to develop new propeller planes for shorter, regional flights.

In contrast, a pittance has been provided to the 346 families that lost loved ones in the two crashes. The total allocated for them is $50 million, amounting to $144,500 per crash victim. This is less than what Muilenburg averaged in a month. At the same time, Boeing has agreed to pay airline corporations $5.6 billion in compensation for lost profits, more than 10 times its compensation to grieving families.

Nor has any relief been provided to the thousands of workers whose livelihoods are being destroyed as a result of the grounding and production halt of the Max 8. Earlier this month, Boeing subcontractor Spirit AeroSystems, based in Witchita, Kansas, indefinitely laid off 2,800 employees. The parts manufacturer generates nearly 50 percent of its income from producing the fuselage for the 737 Max.

General Electric has announced it is laying off 70 temporary employees at its jet engine factory in Quebec as a result of the grounding. While the company was planning these layoffs, it paid its chairman and CEO Larry Culp more than $15 million to oversee job cuts.

Boeing has been further hit by an expose published Monday in the New York Times concerning a crash of a Boeing 737-NG that occurred in February of 2009. A fresh review of the evidence in that crash, which occurred outside of Amsterdam and killed nine people, shows that a faulty sensor triggered a computer command that could not be overridden by the pilots, causing the Turkish Airlines flight to plummet to the ground. This is essentially the same malfunction that caused both Max 8 crashes.

While the findings from that time by the Dutch Safety Board primarily blamed the pilots, it has come to light that a contemporaneous study by Dr. Sidney Dekker, an aviation safety expert, was suppressed at the behest of Boeing because it made clear that the crash was primarily Boeing’s fault. The airplane manufacturer used only a single sensor to trigger the computer command, rather than following normal safety protocol and requiring a second sensor to set off the command.

In the aftermath, it was revealed that Boeing had upgraded its software to take inputs from two sensors in order to avoid this very problem, but had made the second sensor an optional feature on its NG aircraft, installed at an additional cost to the airline. This upgrade, moreover, was incompatible with many older models of the plane, including the one that crashed.

In the case of both the Max 8 and the earlier 737 model, Boeing knew that its software had potentially deadly consequences but kept hidden from airlines, pilots and the flying public knowledge of the problem and the fact that it was working on a fix.

Boeing caused plane crash, air crew blamed

This 20 January 2020 video says about itself:

Boeing used to represent the gold standard in aircraft safety, but critics say it has lost its way in the pursuit of profit. We tell the story of two fatal crashes involving the 737 Max 8 jet: the Ethiopian Airlines crash last March that killed 157 people and the Lion Air disaster in October 2018 that killed all 189 on board. We explore why experts say those disasters were preventable. The story is told by pilots, legislators, Boeing insiders and the families of the people killed. But the biggest revelations come from Boeing itself, through internal messages and emails showing Boeing officials knew about the potential for a catastrophe well before the two crashes occurred.

From the New York Times in the USA:

How Boeing’s Responsibility in a Deadly Crash ‘Got Buried’

By Chris Hamby

Jan. 20, 2020, 6:00 a.m. ET

After a Boeing 737 crashed near Amsterdam more than a decade ago, the Dutch investigators focused blame on the pilots for failing to react properly when an automated system malfunctioned and caused the plane to plummet into a field, killing nine people.

The fault was hardly the crew’s alone, however. Decisions by Boeing, including risky design choices and faulty safety assessments, also contributed to the accident on the Turkish Airlines flight. But the Dutch Safety Board either excluded or played down criticisms of the manufacturer in its final report after pushback from a team of Americans that included Boeing and federal safety officials, documents and interviews show.

The crash, in February 2009, involved a predecessor to Boeing’s 737 Max, the plane that was grounded last year after accidents in Indonesia and Ethiopia killed 346 people and hurled the company into the worst crisis in its history.

A review by The New York Times of evidence from the 2009 accident, some of it previously confidential, reveals striking parallels with the recent crashes — and resistance by the team of Americans to a full airing of findings that later proved relevant to the Max.

In the 2009 and Max accidents, for example, the failure of a single sensor caused systems to misfire, with catastrophic results, and Boeing had not provided pilots with information that could have helped them react to the malfunction. The earlier accident “represents such a sentinel event that was never taken seriously,” said Sidney Dekker, an aviation safety expert who was commissioned by the Dutch Safety Board to analyze the crash.

The study was never made public. The Dutch board backed away from plans to publish it, according to Dr. Dekker and another person with knowledge of its handling. …

At the same time, the Dutch board deleted or amended findings in its own accident report about issues with the plane when the same American team weighed in. The board also inserted statements, some nearly verbatim and without attribution, written by the Americans, who said that certain pilot errors had not been “properly emphasized.”

The muted criticism of Boeing after the 2009 accident fits within a broader pattern, brought to light since the Max tragedies, of the company benefiting from a light-touch approach by safety officials.

References to Dr. Dekker’s findings in the final report were brief, not clearly written and not sufficiently highlighted, according to multiple aviation safety experts with experience in crash investigations who read both documents.

One of them, David Woods, a professor at the Ohio State University who has served as a technical adviser to the Federal Aviation Administration, said the Turkish Airlines crash “should have woken everybody up.”

Some of the parallels between that accident and the more recent ones are particularly noteworthy. Boeing’s design decisions on both the Max and the plane involved in the 2009 crash — the 737 NG, or Next Generation — allowed a powerful computer command to be triggered by a single faulty sensor, even though each plane was equipped with two sensors, as Bloomberg reported last year. In the two Max accidents, a sensor measuring the plane’s angle to the wind prompted a flight control computer to push its nose down after takeoff; on the Turkish Airlines flight, an altitude sensor caused a different computer to cut the plane’s speed just before landing.

Boeing had determined before 2009 that if the sensor malfunctioned, the crew would quickly recognize the problem and prevent the plane from stalling — much the same assumption about pilot behavior made with the Max.

And as with the more recent crashes, Boeing had not included information in the NG operations manual that could have helped the pilots respond when the sensor failed.

Even a fix now proposed for the Max has similarities with the past: After the crash near Amsterdam, the F.A.A. required airlines to install a software update for the NG that compared data from the plane’s two sensors, rather than relying on just one. The software change Boeing has developed for the Max also compares data from two sensors.

Critically, in the case of the NG, Boeing had already developed the software fix well before the Turkish Airlines crash, including it on new planes starting in 2006 and offering it as an optional update on hundreds of other aircraft. But for some older jets, including the one that crashed near Amsterdam, the update wouldn’t work, and Boeing did not develop a compatible version until after the accident.

The Dutch investigators deemed it “remarkable” that Boeing left airlines without an option to obtain the safeguard for some older planes. But in reviewing the draft accident report, the Americans objected to the statement, according to the final version’s appendix, writing that a software modification had been unnecessary because “no unacceptable risk had been identified.” GE Aviation, which had bought the company that made the computers for the older jets, also suggested deleting or changing the sentence.

Dr. Woods, who was Dr. Dekker’s Ph.D. adviser, said the decision to exclude or underplay the study’s principal findings enabled Boeing and its American regulators to carry out “the narrowest possible changes.”

The problem with the single sensor, he said, should have dissuaded Boeing from using a similar design in the Max. Instead, “the issue got buried.”

Boeing declined to address detailed questions from The Times. …

At the request of the American team led by the N.T.S.B., the Dutch added comments that further emphasized the pilots’ culpability. The final report, for example, included a new statement that scolded the captain, saying he could have used the situation to teach the first officer a “lesson” on following protocol. …

The Dekker study found that another decision by Boeing — to leave important information out of the operations manual — had also hampered the Turkish Airlines pilots. …

What the pilots couldn’t have known was that the computer controlling the engine thrust always relied on the left sensor, even when the controls on the right were flying the plane. That critical information was nowhere to be found in the Boeing pilots’ manual, Dr. Dekker learned. …

“It’s really easy to blame it on the dead pilots and say it has nothing to do with our improperly designed system,” said Shawn Pruchnicki, who teaches at Ohio State and has worked on accident investigations for the Air Line Pilots Association.

See also Dutch daily De Volkskrant on this.

See also here.

Boeing lethal aircraft boss gets $80.7 million

By Bryan Dyne in the USA:

After two crashes that killed 346 people

Fired CEO Dennis Muilenburg gets $80.7 million on exit from Boeing

13 January 2020

Ex-Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg left the aerospace giant with $80.7 million in salary, stock options and other bonuses after he was forced to resign from the company in December, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing disclosed on Friday. Chief among his services rendered was spearheading the production and certification of the 737 Max 8 aircraft, which killed 346 passengers and crew in two crashes, making it one of the deadliest commercial jets ever put into service.

Muilenburg’s assets include shares worth $4.3 million, pension and back pay totaling $28.5 million and long-term stock options amounting to $29.4 million. Boeing also preserved his right to purchase nearly 73,000 shares of company stock at a pro-rated value of $5.5 million, which he could then resell for $24 million.

Having rushed the new jet into service, cutting safety corners and covering up known and potentially fatal engineering and software dangers, and then vouching for the safety of the plane after both the first crash, in October 2018, and the second, in March 2019, Muilenburg’s “punishment” was the loss of his severance package, worth an estimated $14.6 million.

Boeing allocated only $50 million in compensation for the 346 families who lost loved ones in the two crashes—Lion Air Flight 610 outside of Jakarta, Indonesia, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 outside Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The lives lost, according to the company, are only worth $144,500 each, less than what Muilenburg averaged in a month.

The callousness with which Boeing has treated the crash victims’ families as compared to its chief executive is an example of class justice in America. A worker accused of reckless driving in Washington state, where the Max 8 is made, can be thrown into jail for 364 days and fined up to $5,000. The corporate CEO who recklessly went ahead developing a deadly aircraft and who should be tried for the murder of hundreds of men, women and children is rewarded with a new windfall to add to his fortune.

Moreover, as the result of the grounding of the Max 8 after the second crash and production freeze that began this month, Boeing subcontractor Spirit AeroSystems has laid off 2,800 employees. The parts manufacturer generates 80 percent of its revenue from its Boeing contract, a large portion of which is making the fuselage for the deadly plane.

The company has also announced that it will be laying off more workers at its plants in Tulsa and McAlester, Oklahoma, none of whom will receive any compensation from Boeing for having their livelihoods destroyed. These are no doubt only the first of many thousands of layoffs the working class will be forced to suffer as a result of the company’s greed and negligence.

The criminality of the Max 8 enterprise was again laid bare on Thursday, when the Washington Post reported that Boeing had submitted to Congress a trove of internal communications in which employees with their names redacted expressed their frustrations with the management of the project and fears that the aircraft was unsafe to fly.

“This is a joke. This airplane is ridiculous,” commented one employee in a conversation regarding updates to the Max hardware and software. “Fix one thing, break [three] others.” A different missive exclaimed, “I’ll be shocked if the FAA passes this turd.”

Another message proposed darkly that one could avoid the dangers of the Max 8 by committing suicide. “Get silencer, put on end of gun, place adjacent to temple, and pull trigger—the problems stop. At this point, how can they consider continuing?”

An email from 2018 suggests that problems similar to those that have plagued the Max 8 are continuing in the development of Boeing’s newest plane, the 777X. It reads: “Why did the lowest ranking and most unproven supplier receive the contract? Solely based on the bottom dollar. Not just MAX but also the 777X! Supplier management drives all these decisions… Best part is we are re-starting this whole thing with the 777X with the same supplier and have signed up to an even more aggressive schedule!”

The documents also show the lengths Boeing was willing to go to ensure that pilot simulator training not be required for the Max 8 in order to keep overhead costs as low as possible. Emails signed by Boeing’s 737 chief technical pilot at the time, Mark Forkner, stressed “the importance of holding firm that there will not be any type of simulator training required to transition from NG to Max” when discussing the aircraft with federal regulators.

Forkner also played a key role in forcing international regulators to accept Boeing’s assertion that only a minimal computer-based training course was required to fly the Max 8. He wrote, likely to regulators at India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation, that there “is only one difference between the [737 NG] and [737 Max]”, and they should withdraw their reservations because the regulatory agencies in Argentina, Canada, China, Europe, Malaysia and the US had already done so.

As was conclusively shown by Indonesia’s aviation regulatory agency in its final report of the Lion Air crash, the planes plunged to their doom as a result of a previously little-known anti-stall mechanism called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which was concealed from test pilots during the Max 8’s certification and kept out of manuals used by commercial pilots flying the aircraft, even after the first crash.

There are no innocent explanations for these exposures. Despite Boeing’s denials that the emails “are inconsistent with Boeing values”, they make clear that the company, its executives and its major shareholders gave far greater weight to their profits and stock prices than the safety of the people who would eventually be on board the flying deathtrap.

This includes $200 billion made by major Boeing shareholders such as The Vanguard Group, T. Rowe Price Associates, the Newport Trust Co., SSGA Funds Management and Blackrock Fund Advisors, among others, from the time the Max 8 was first announced to just before the second crash. For his part, Muilenburg made $6.5 million selling stock the month before Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 plummeted to its destruction, suggesting that he and other executives who made similar multi-million-dollar windfalls had concerns about the safety of the plane.

The criminalization of the American ruling class is the product of the degeneration and crisis of the entire social and economic system of capitalism. The Boeing disasters underscore above all the need to mobilize the working class to expropriate the major banks and giant corporations in order to transform them into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities.

Elon Musk, Amazon, Boeing damage astronomy

This 10 December 2019 video from Britain says about itself:

Why SpaceX Starlink is bad for Astronomy

2019 Physics Nobel laureate Prof. Didier Queloz (Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge) talks about how astronomy is being affected and will be affected by the satellite business. This is part of a longer interview on the discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star filmed on 27/11/2019.

“I think it’s really a threat to send not a couple of hundred of satellites but having 10, 20, 50 thousand satellites in low-Earth orbit. […] Is the society ready to lose the sky? Is the sky something that should be free or is it a new market?”, Didier Queloz said.

Translated from Belgian daily De Standaard, 2 January 2020:

Stars, planets and … satellites

In the coming years, so many satellites will go into space that astronomers will soon be unable to ignore them. The light pollution has now also reached the starry sky.

By Senne Starckx

We already knew that Elon Musk is ambitious. His plan to provide the entire world with super-fast internet from space is also not lacking in ambition. That will be clear again tomorrow – if all goes well – a Falcon 9 rocket will be launched from Cape Canaveral with no fewer than sixty satellites on board. The satellites will be placed in a 1,200-kilometer high orbit where they will become part of the Starlink network. With this, the US American billionaire hopes to be able to offer broadband internet to any earthling who has a Starlink receiver (and subscription) in a few years’ time. …

In the meantime, SpaceX has applied to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for no fewer than 30,000 satellites. …

Astronomers are worried. The International Astronomical Union has already complained to the ITU. The organization fears that private corporations such as SpaceX obscure the view of astronomers (and their telescopes on the ground) with their drive.

This drive is, of course, a consequence of the lack of laws and rules in space. The British astrophysicist Dave Clements of Imperial College London even speaks on the BBC website of the loss of “the commons that the night sky has always been”. …

However, it will soon be difficult to make images that do not show satellite, even for amateurs with relatively cheap telescopes. “For us, this is a new blow in our faces,” says Philippe Mollet of Mira Observatory in Grimbergen. “The light pollution that has been bothering us for decades when we look at the night sky from urbanized areas (where most of the old observatories are located, ed.) Is now also troubling us up there.” …

Less reflection, more warming

SpaceX has since announced that the corporation wants to do everything it can to minimize the impact of their satellites on astronomical observations. As a test, a number of satellites that will be launched tomorrow were therefore treated with a special coating that should reflect less light. “But the less radiation a satellite reflects, the more it absorbs and warms up,” says Stijn Ilsen, aerospace engineer at the Kruibeke location of satellite builder Qinetic Space. “That adaptation must therefore still be adequately tested, because it can seriously disrupt the thermal properties of the satellite (it could damage the electronics, ed.).” Ilsen does not expect that to be technically insurmountable, “provided that researchers have sufficient time ‘.

But now time and patience are scarce with hyper-ambitious corporations such as SpaceX. Especially now that there are competitors: other big corporations such as Amazon and Boeing also have plans for immense swarms of broadband satellites. The range of bandwidth that will be offered to future customers can lead companies to focus on the lowest orbits, up to a few hundred kilometers high where the satellites are best visible – sometimes even with the naked eye. “If you go higher, you lose more signal and therefore bandwidth,” says Ilsen. “With increasing altitude, your coverage does increase, so you need fewer satellites.” However, the last consideration today seems to be a thing of the past, as companies such as SpaceX no longer look at more or fewer satellite numbers and organizations such as the ITU don’t stand in their way. “It is high time that something is done,” says Mollet. “Private corporations now have free rein in space.”

New fleets of private satellites are clogging the night sky. Global internet satellites are photobombing telescopes and messing with astronomers’ research: here.

Boeing lethal airplanes scandal continues

This 2011 TV from the USA says about itself:

GRITtv: Mike Papantonio: Doing the Bidding of Boeing

“Tell me how it’s beneficial to us for the State Department to be doing the bidding of Boeing“, Mike Papantonio says of the recent disclosure by WikiLeaks that State has been shilling for U.S.-based multinationals overseas.

By Bryan Dyne in the USA:

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg forced to resign

24 December 2019

Aerospace giant Boeing announced on Monday that Dennis Muilenburg has resigned from his position as president and CEO and will be replaced by current company chairman David Calhoun on January 13, 2020. Muilenburg will forever be remembered as the corporate head who oversaw the development and certification of the deadly 737 Max 8 aircraft, which crashed twice in the last 14 months, killing a total of 346 passengers and crew.

Muilenburg was fired days after the company’s Starliner spacecraft failed to reach the proper Earth orbit, a week after Boeing suspended production of the Max 8, and two weeks after ex-employee Ed Pierson testified before the House Transportation Subcommittee that senior corporate management were aware that their flagship jet was unsafe prior to the two disasters. In its press release, Boeing stated that a “change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the Company moving forward.”

In other words, the airplane manufacturer is casting Muilenburg aside, no doubt with a huge golden parachute to insure his continued loyalty,

No doubt indeed: a parachute of scores of millions of dollars.

in an attempt rebrand itself and its best-selling airplane and to minimize the already considerable economic fallout. Since the Max 8 was grounded, Boeing has lost an estimated $9 billion to suits from families, airlines, unions and others related to the two crashes and the subsequent grounding of the Max 8 in March.

The company’s shareholders, however, remember well that the company’s stock increased by $200 billion from when the Max 8 was first announced in 2011 to when it was grounded. They are eager to see such gains continue and view the 346 human lives lost as the cost of doing business.

To be clear, Muilenburg was not removed as punishment for making faulty aircraft. If that had been the case, he would have been removed after the first crash in October 2018 or after the second this past March. The change in leadership is occurring because for the past nine months, Muilenburg has been unable to convince the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and international aviation safety agencies that the Max 8 is safe to fly.

This period has also exposed the rotten inner workings of the company as a whole, which in turn is a microcosm of the entire capitalist mode of production. Numerous leaks and congressional testimonies have conclusively shown that senior Boeing leadership were aware that they were putting an unsafe aircraft into service. A sample of these include:

• Two requests from manager Ed Pierson to shut down the Max 8 production line in order to correct the “deteriorating factory conditions” at the Renton, Washington, Boeing 737 production facility.

• Boeing’s decision to attach newer and bigger engines to a five-decade-old airframe in order to cut costs, speed up production, and rush certification. This resulted in a plane that tended to stall and forced Boeing engineers to install corrective software, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which has been determined to be the immediate cause of both crashes.

• The omission of the MCAS from flight training manuals, even though Boeing drastically expanded the scope and power of the software shortly before the Max 8’s launch without any notification to the FAA, other regulatory agencies, pilots, airlines or the flying public.

• The admission by Muilenburg himself that he was aware of various red flags around the safety of the MCAS and presented the plane as safe anyway.

All of these are crimes of commission or omission that led directly to the two crashes and the 346 deaths. To date, however, neither Muilenburg nor his cohorts have been prosecuted or even charged for the murder of hundreds of human beings.

Calhoun is only the first among many who are also culpable. They include Chief Financial Officer Gregory Smith, Executive Vice President John Keating and General Counsel Michael Luttig, who all made a fortune selling stocks in the month before the second crash worth $9.5 million, $10.1 million, $9.5 million and $6.5 million, respectively.

Other Boeing directors include Admiral Edmund Giambastiani, Admiral John Richardson, former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and former US Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy (daughter of President John F. Kennedy). Their presence makes clear that there will be no serious attempt to bring charges against Boeing because the company and the US government are not adversaries. Instead, there is a coming together of the giant corporation, the financial aristocracy and the military-intelligence apparatus that defends it.

It also makes clear the role of the FAA, which has also been discredited in the aftermath of the Max 8 crashes. Not only did it not ground the plane after the first crash, it refused to ground it after the second crash until virtually every other authority in the world had done so.

Moreover, congressional testimony revealed that the agency calculated the month after the first crash that the Max 8 was such a faulty aircraft that it would average one fatal crash every two or three years—another 15 large-scale disasters during its expected lifespan—well above what it or any regulatory agency considers safe for a commercial airplane. This report was suppressed for a year and is one of many instances in which the FAA has aided an abetting Boeing’s criminal pursuit of private profit at the expense of human lives.

In an about-face of its previous stance regarding simulator training for pilots flying its 737 Max aircraft, airplane manufacturer Boeing released a statement Tuesday calling for “simulator training in addition to computer-based training for all Max pilots prior to return to service of the 737 Max.” The statement includes the company’s pro forma claim of an “unstinting commitment to the safe return to service” of the grounded plane, following two crashes that killed a combined total of 346 men, women and children: here.

DAMNING BOEING CHATS REVEALED Boeing released hundreds of internal messages that raise serious questions about its 737 Max that was grounded in March after two fatal crashes. “This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys,” one unnamed employee wrote. [Reuters]

Failed Boeing killer planes boss’ golden handshake

This 29 April 2019 video says about itself:

The families of Canadians killed in the Ethiopian Airlines crash last month have launched a lawsuit against plane maker Boeing.

Lawyers in Chicago have filed the suit on behalf of a Brampton, Ont., family that lost six members and a man who lost his Hamilton-based wife and three young children.

All 157 people on board Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were killed when the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft en route from Addis Ababa to Nairobi crashed on March 10.

Lawyers for the families behind the lawsuit allege Boeing was blinded by greed as it rushed its 737 Max 8 jets to market, claiming the company put profits over safety.

The families have also filed a claim against the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, alleging the regulator enabled the plane’s rush to market.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

The fired chief executive of aircraft manufacturer Boeing can claim tens of millions. All in all, Dennis Muilenburg’s severance arrangement gives him around 33 million euros. At the current Boeing share price of more than 300 euros, Bloomberg news agency has calculated.

Muilenburg is also entitled to a pension scheme of almost 12 million euros. He also has shares in the company with a current value of 39 million euros. If the price rises, it can therefore become even more.

Muilenburg has made tens of millions since he took office in 2015, largely through stock options and bonuses. He was sent out by the board yesterday because of the crisis around the 737 MAX aircraft.

They have been on the ground for months worldwide because two air disasters happened, killing 346 people in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

Both accidents were caused by software errors in the operating system of the device. …

Boeing not only builds commercial aircraft, but also military aircraft, helicopters, satellites, missiles and weapon systems. The loss that the company suffers because of the problems with the 737 MAX is only a fraction of the billions in turnover it makes every year.

Boeing boss resigns in lethal airplanes scandal

This 23 December 2019 video says about itself:

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg steps down after 737 MAX crisis | DW News

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg has resigned. The aircraft manufacturer faced multiple setbacks this year, including industrial scandals after two fatal crashes of Boeing’s 737 MAX jetliner and the aborted flight test of its Starliner spacecraft. An inquiry revealed major problems with regulatory oversight of the company’s operations. Muilenberg’s departure is effective immediately. He’ll be replaced by Chairman David Calhoun.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

Boeing has been around for over a hundred years and is the largest industrial exporter in the United States. The corporation is sometimes called the flagship of US American industry. In addition to passenger and cargo aircraft, the company also makes military equipment and spacecraft.