Comments

1

Totally sad, but not surprising. A friend/acquaintance from several years ago works for Boeing and told me that she was pressured by senior men to take shortcuts in safety checks and the like for efficiency.
Said none were dangerous on their own, but as these potential oversights begin to mount there could be serious problems.

2

Charles, you should extend your premise to evaluate whether there is a connection between all the planes that landed safely and the greed of Boeing's executives and shareholders.

In addition, you need to explore the connection of Boeing shareholders whom aren't greedy, such Boeing employees, as you should be aware that employees are shareholders and I'm sure you didn't want to imply that the average Boeing worker is greedy.

3

Thankfully, once the Green New Deal illiminates the “need” for air travel, wrecks like this will never again occur.

But, in the meantime, it sounds like those Africans need to start building their own jets...

Speaking of the Green New Deal... How’s that African bullet train system coming??? On target for AOC’s ten year plan?

4

Then why is flying the safest it's ever been in its history?

6

@5
If Charlie says you were oppressed. You were oppressed. Don’t fuck up his narrative. His delicate, simple minded, grasp on “reality” depends upon it.

8

The MCAS, assuming that winds up being the cause, seems more like an artifact of over- and under-engineering than of greed. Airbus went through something similar when fly-by-wire first came out. They were so pleased with their invention, they were blind to its flaws, until it mistook takeoff for landing. Ditto Boeing with the servo control unit on the old 737’s. It couldn’t possibly fail, until it steered hundreds of people into the ground at full speed. Now the MCAS - hey, this new system will create added safety, and we don’t need to tell pilots to pay extra attention to a couple of new lines in the flight manual where we detail the super-simple operation where you go left joystick-right joystick-A-C-reverse kick while the stick shakes and your airplane screams: “I’m just going to fall out of the sky now!” It’s logic only someone nose-deep in a pile of schemae and tech soecs could love, but imagine all the competing priorities they’re trying to solve for!

But it’s early to conclude this and Lion Air are the same. My first thought was MCAS, but every crash is a complex, cascading series of events that conspire to create catastrophe.

The focus on extracting current value out of corporations is its own kind of catastrophe, but drawing a causal connection between that and this is just careless.

9

..."had flown more than 8,000 hours with an 'excellent flying record'")...

The co-pilot had 200 hours — barely a trainee, by the standards of big ol’ jet airliners — and you’d better believe that point will be well-investigated. Cry racism all you want, but such a huge disparity in flight hours between seats will draw the attention of investigators.

10

Even for Charles this piece of shit post is a really pathetic low blow for a hard left that's lost it's way, has no focus and can only hide behind "racism" behind any tragedy.

11

Tbh, my first reaction when I heard about the crash was: airlines in Africa don’t have a sterling safety record. Is that racist? No - I didn’t think: Africans suck at flying planes. I know colonialists and ither world powers have been stacking the against the entire continent for centuries. That initial reaction was quickly replaced with the recognition that Ethiopian Airlines is respected and successful and that safety across Africa has improved.

Why did I know this? The reporting said so.

If anything, the silver lining to this tragedy is the lack of racism in the articles on it.

12

@3 Nobody said implementing a green new deal would be easy, especially with you assholes dragging your feet every inch of the way as you have for the last 20 years. You do know that the sooner we move on it, the cheaper and the easier it will be to beat anthropogenic climate change, right?

13

This is a very rudimentary view of stock buybacks. A company will sell shares of their stock when they need extra cash for a major project. When this project is complete and they have sold XX widgets, they will take that revenue and will buyback shares which will bring in more investors which raises more cash. Once they have raised enough stock equity they will sell off more shares for the next project.

16

Boeing stock crashed so hard, it's up 16%year-over-year.

If Charles had followed the links in his sole cite for "racist" coverage, he'd know that for decades up to 2011, African airlines had an aggregate safety record 9 times worse than the global aggregate.

The Lion Air crash was not reported "Soon after the predictable racist impulse dissolved" ... it was immediately reported in all coverage of the Ethiopian crash.

And the "first move" in any coverage I found was not to "point the finger" at Ethiopian Airlines (but I do admit I missed that opinion squib by one commentator on Turkish TV).

Reading Charles on race and economics is no more enlightening than listening to Trump on race and economics,

17

I sincerely hope this piece is intended to be humorous.

18

@16

Is Ethiopian Air an aggregate African airline?

19

"But an Asian airline experienced a crash in the same type of plane as the black African one. The attention then shifted from race to the makers of the jet. "

Disagree. Comments (if not the articles themselves) at seattletimes.com were entirely focused on 3rd world airline with 3rd world pilots.

20

@18 -- I see you're having trouble keeping up, but I don't have time right now to write a slow-learner tutorial. Sorry. Read the cites?


Please wait...

and remember to be decent to everyone
all of the time.

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.