It Could Happen Here - What’s the Matter With Boeing, Pt. 2: The Plane That’s Trying to Murders You

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

As the shareholder revolution takeover continues, Boeing builds a plan that tries to crash itself and fixes it with software that also tries to crash the plane. Hundreds die. Sources: Boeing CEO Out in Sex Scandal As Boeing Agrees to Plead Guilty to Fraud, a Look Back at What Led Up to the 737 Max Crashes That Killed 346 People SpaceX launches rescue mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck in space until next year Whistleblower Joshua Dean, Who Raised Concerns About Boeing Jets, Dies at 45 How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer Key events in the troubled history of the Boeing 737 Max The inside story of MCAS: How Boeing’s 737 MAX system gained power and lost safeguardsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko

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in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura.

I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Call Zone Media. Welcome to A Could Happen Here, a podcast about things happening to Boeing. I'm your host, Mio Wong. When we last left our intrepid aerospace company, Boeing had gotten caught up in the mergers and acquisitions frenzy of the 1990s and bought out its rival, McDonnell Douglas. After which, McDonnell Douglas

CEO and Jack Welch disciple Harry Stonecipher effectively launched an administrative coup and seized control of the company. Now, Stonecipher wasn't able to hold onto power for long because he was very quickly forced to resign after he had what CNN describes as a, quote, improper relationship with a female executive. So things are going great for everyone. I'm realizing reading the script that I I should mention it wasn't like an abuse thing. It's just that he was having a relationship with one of his subordinates, which is also not great, but it, yeah, it wasn't good, and he gets kicked out almost immediately. But by the time he was forced out, his model for how

Boeing should work going forward, you know, the layoffs, the outsourcing, slashing the research and development budget, and above all, taking power from engineers and giving it to the shareholder value fanatics had already been embedded at the core of Boeing's management structure. Here's journalist Natasha Frost writing in Quartz. Two decades on, perhaps the most lasting consequence of the change in culture has been in Boeing's approach to building aircraft. Cutting costs and diversifying revenue ought to have served as an ideal way to subsidize the expensive process of plane development. Oh boy, did it not. Instead, with engineers now disempowered and management far away in Chicago, the actual building of new planes in Seattle all but stalled.

Boeing would not actually announce even the plans for a new plane until 2003 with the 787 Dreamliner. Throughout this time, Boeing was led by its first chairman without a traditional aviation background, James McNary. James McNary had instead spent almost two decades in management at General Electric. Now, he was following a tried and tested route of cutting, downsizing, and shifting. That approach was applied to upgrading the 737, which had become the victim of its own success. In its five-decade history, airlines have cumulatively ordered more than 10,000 of the plane, an aviation rock star. But rather than retiring the plane and replacing it with the next big thing,

Boeing opted to keep costs down by tinkering and adjusting the model to fit still more passengers. And this is how you get planes falling out of the sky. Instead of, you know, doing the normal thing, which is putting money into building a new airplane, which is, you know, expensive in the short run. And again, remember that the finance schools are now in charge. For these people, the only thing that exists is the short-run and immediate stock price. So instead of doing that, management went, eh, we already have this plane we first designed in the fucking 60s. Let's keep modifying that. And this is going to kill an extremely large number of people. The 737, again, came out originally in 1967.

In the 2000s, in the century, the millennia, the 2000s, Boeing begins to design a new version of this plane from the last millennium called the 737 MAX. For shareholders, again, this is a great idea. It's not just that building new planes is expensive again this is this is a great idea it's not just that you know building new planes is expensive and this is cheaper because you're not spending the money on building a new plane there's a bunch of other advantages for boeing for this and one of the biggest is that you can tell everyone from you know the fah to the airline to the pilots that hey this is just a regular 737 it's it's just the

same plane you don't need to like retrain your pilots to learn how our new systems work because there's really like no new systems and that you know that costs money so they don't want to do it you don't need to have the faa do the regulatory shit they would do for a new plane or even like a substantial change to like the original plane which you know again costs money and time that boeing does not want to you know do the problem is that you know i i tried to find a sort of delicate way to say this and then i realized you simply should not do it like that the problem is that the 737 max is a plane that is trying to kill you if you know anything about this story you're probably assuming that when i say this plane is trying to kill you if you know anything about this story you're probably assuming that when i say this

plane is trying to kill you i'm talking about the maneuvering characteristics augmentation system or mcast the piece of software that directly caused the crashes and to some extent like i am talking about mcast uh we'll we'll get into it in a second it absolutely did kill all those people but i think there's a problem with a lot of the way the story has been covered which is that a lot of the coverage of this has been obsessively focused on the software problem specifically on mcas and i understand why people focus on the software it is the immediate cause of the crash but the real problem with the 737 MAX is that the actual physical plane is also trying to kill you. And the software MCAS was developed to, again, stop the plane from trying to kill you.

Now, that software is also trying to kill you, but both the software and the physical plane are trying to murder you. So, you know, what do I mean when I say the physical plane is trying to kill you? So, you know, what do I mean when I say the physical plane is trying to kill you? For this, I'm going to turn to an actual engineer and pilot, Gregory Travis, who wrote probably the best piece in the technical details of this whole problem that I've seen for IEEE Spectrum. IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. They know what they're talking about. Spectrum's their magazine. So the initial problem as travis explains was this the original 737 was designed for 1960s engines modern airplanes have way bigger engines

because due to a bunch of engineering stuff that we're not going to get into here large engines are more efficient than small engines and this is a huge deal for aircraft, which consume unbelievably large quantities of extremely expensive fuel. The safe and sensible, but again, expensive option would have been to design a new aircraft to replace the 737 that is actually designed to accommodate the new giant engines. The cheapskate option would be to just uh bolt the new giant engines onto the old plane design now the problem is that the only way to do this is to move the engines forward the the engines on 737 are you know under the wing which is like the normal thing but uh the engines would no longer fit under the way because they were too, and moving the engines forward changes where the

thrust is coming from. Here's Travis. Quote, now, when pilots supplied power to the engine, the aircraft would have a significant propensity to pitch up or raise its nose. Now, this, as you might expect, is not good. It is quite bad. I mean, airplanes, and Travis talks about this, airplanes do kind of naturally do this a little bit. This plane does it way, way more than it's supposed to. So here's where things unfortunately get a bit technical. So the nose going up increases something called the angle of attack. I'm going to read a description of this.

Fully understanding exactly how the angle of attack works is not enormously important to understanding the story. But, you know, the crux of this story is angle of attack sensors not working. So we have to explain it a little bit. Quote, the angle of attack is the angle between the wings and the airflow over the wings. So if you want to understand exactly what this is, go read the piece. The important thing for our purposes is that if the angle of attack gets too high right if the plane's sort of level and it's flying normally the angle of attack is like zero but the angle of attack can get higher as like you know if you're not flying

like level and if the angle of attack gets too high the plane stalls and this is one of the ways you crash a plane worse still in the 737 max the basically the engine casings themselves can at high angles of attack work as a wing and produce lift and the lift they produce is well ahead of the wing center of lift meaning the the engine casings will cause the 737 at a high angle of attack to go to a higher angle of attack. This is aerodynamic mispractice of the worst kind. An airplane approaching an aerodynamic stall cannot, under any circumstances, have the tendency to go further into the stall.

This is called, quote, dynamic instability, and the only airplanes that exhibit that characteristic, fighter jets, are also fitted with ejector seats. So let me try to kind of like explain the sort of crux of this. Well, A, they've managed to position the engines in such a way that the engines can act as a wing,

which is insane. And B, once you get to a high enough angle of attack, which again, the higher the angle of attack you're at, the more risk you're at of stalling, the plane starts trying to kill you by making the angle of attack, which again, the higher the angle of attack you're at, the more risk you're at of stalling, the plane starts trying to kill you by making the angle of attack increase. It is a feedback loop that means when you start to stall,

the airplane makes you stall more. Planes are not supposed to do this. Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, quote, this is called dynamic instability, and the only airplanes which exhibit this characteristic, fighter jets are also fitted with ejector seats so again this is a thing that is dangerous enough that you get like regular

regular civilian airplanes are not supposed to do this they do it on fighter jets because fighter jets are doing things that planes aren't supposed to do and you can leave the plane if it fucks up it does something like this and the worst part about this is that you can kick off this problem by trying to get the plane going faster. But while it's going slow, what part of flying a plane does it start slow, is kind of at a high angle of attack, and then has to go faster? Oh, wait, takeoff, the thing you have to do every single time you fly. This is fucking batshit. No one would intentionally design a new airliner like this, right?

No one. Not even modern. I mean, Boeing's other airplanes, even the modern ones, even the Dreamliner, doesn't fucking do this, right? It's completely nuts. The only way that you could get something like this is as a pure product of trying to bolt increasingly

large engines onto a plane from the 60s because you are too cheap to try to do anything new but you know who isn't afraid of doing new things it's the products and services that support this podcast i've never gotten a boeing ad but i if it was gonna happen i guess it probably happened now dear god Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout?

Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Thank you. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week

to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, line.com. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen

to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. wherever you get your podcasts. But instead of, you know, dealing with this problem by either making a new fucking plane or figuring out some way to not have the engines literally become wings,

Boeing was like, eh, fuck it, we'll just build some software that pushes the plane's nose down if it starts doing this. Now, if your reaction to hearing let's put software on the plane's nose down if it starts doing this. Now, if your reaction to hearing, let's put software on the plane that makes it fly towards the ground is, wait, that's a terrible idea. You have the right idea. These people did not have the right idea. But stunningly,

there's like a version of this system that isn't like lethally unsafe. But, comma, like lethally unsafe but comma poland did not design a version of this that is even remotely safe i don't know if that's more egregious than designing an aircraft that has dynamic instability but uh the way they implement this is egregious they decided in their infinite wisdom that the entire system would work on a single sensor and i we need to note before we start this uh so this is we're gonna be talking about angled attack sensors they're kind of just like pieces of metal that stick out the side of the plane and they break a lot and they break a lot because flying a plane is like the worst thing you can possibly do to a piece of equipment doesn't involve leaving the atmosphere or putting it under the ocean yeah so here's from the seattle times which is the old times actually because you know boeing has traditionally been in

seattle like does a lot of very very good coverage on this they have good sources yeah from the seattle times quote the most controversial deal of the mcast design has been the reliance on a single angle of attack sensor of both of deadly flights, everything started with a faulty sensor. In the second crash in Ethiopia, the data trace strongly suggests that the sensor was destroyed in an instant, likely by a bird strike. There are two such sensors, one on either side of the fuselage. Why didn't Boeing, especially after discarding the G-Force as a trigger, use both angle of attack sensors? The thinking was that requiring input from two angle of attack sensors would mean that if one failed, the system would not function.

Now, the article goes on to talk about how their justification for why they only use one sensor. And, you know, they talked about the safety and simplicity of not wanting to add complexity to a system, you know, because if you have two things that you're running for, it's slightly more complex than having one thing that you're running from. Now, this kind of sounds reasonable at first glance, but first off, if your plane has dynamic instability that causes it to snowball into stalling, and this software system to make it not do that is so important you can't risk it not being on if one of the two sensors breaks then maybe you shouldn't have designed your plane like this and second this entire system violates every design principle

that you see in sort of like boeing's good aircraft design for simplicity and safety risk and i want to go back to that spectrum article because it lays out how this kind of thing is supposed to work quote there were two sets of angle of attack sensors and two sets of pitot tubes, one on either side of the fuselage. Normal usage is to have the set on the pilot's side feed the instruments to the pilot's side, and the set on the co-pilot's side feed the instrument to the co-pilot's side. That gives a state of natural redundancy in instrumentation that can be easily cross-checked by either pilot. If the co-pilot thinks his airspeed indicator is acting up, he can look over at the pilot's airspeed indicator and see if it agrees. If not, both pilot and co-pilot can

engage in a bit of triage to determine which instrument is profane and which is sacred. Now, this is great engineering, right? It is simple, it is redundant, and it allows humans to sort out issues. You know, and like, this is a product of what aerospace engineering used to be, you know, and we still have this in the world. But the fact that there are a bunch of very, very good engineers who have spent an enormously long time trying to work out how this kind of stuff should work. I'm trying to work out how this kind of stuff should work. Modern Boeing was like, well, you know, instead of our system where multiple sensors can be cross-referenced by pilots, you know, and the pilots can then disable the system, fuck that, what if we instead use a single sensor that can't be overridden? This is a complete violation of Boeing design principle. The thing about Boeing planes is that there isn't supposed to be, like,

automated shit running in the background that pilots don't know about or don't know how to turn off the pilot is supposed to be in complete control of the plane you know the old joke and i mean i remember hearing this like every once in a while like when i was a kid was that airbus planes which you know airbus obviously is a rival to boeing airbus planes were quote die by wire because you know they didn't give you control the documentary that frontline did called boeing Flaw, which I didn't really use as a source for this, but I just, this is the one part that I remember from when I watched this in 2019 about the crash, which described how, like, pilots trusted that they were flying an aircraft designed by Boeing so there would be a way to kill the system. And again, that's something I remember, like, from talking to people growing up. You know, so these pilots figured that there'd be a way to kill the system that was forcing the plane down

and they were trying to find it like they're trying to figure out how to turn the system off in the manual when they died because they didn't realize the plane wasn't designed by boeing engineers it was designed by boeing shareholders going back to the process on how this was added the the stated reason for again why you don't want a second sensor is that it in theory like adds complexity by adding a second sensor but you know that's actually terrible reasoning from the perspective of engineering of like of engineering in general but also like from the perspective of the engineering that the rest of the plane works on right the rest of the plane works on, right? The rest of the plane works on different principles than this, and it works well.

And it's something that Travis describes as being a product of the destruction of Bowie's collective knowledge base. But something I don't know, I don't know to what extent Travis, he's kind of writing about this, but I'm not sure that a lot of the people writing about this like understand that like this was the point right destroying this kind of collective knowledge this is something that was done deliberately right this was the inevitable sort of product of boeing management trying to make the company quote-unquote run like a business they were trying to destroy the interpersonal bonds that create this system of collective knowledge. And they were trying to take power out of the hands of people who had that collective knowledge and put it into the hands of people who you could pay for really cheap and exploit more,

who did not have access to that kind of information. Right? This is a case for like, yeah, you're putting power in the hands of software engineers instead of sort of aviation engineers. Speaking of, I don't know, taking power out of the hands of the consumer and giving it to a corporation, here's ads. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High,

is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted,

pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them.

Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment

with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes.

You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology.

I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, if you're trying to make the company, quote unquote, run like a business, what else would you do?

quote-unquote, run like a business. What else would you do? Oh, yeah, you would not tell the pilots about this new system that you've added to your airplane because if you talk about the system, everyone from, you know, the FAA to the airlines to the pilots unions might realize that this is not the same plane as the 737. And that would require all sorts of stuff,

like, again, recertifying the plane trading pilots on simulators of your new plane which is not the old plane it requires all sorts of stuff that would have very well could have prevented these crashes but you know that stuff all costs money and boeing doesn't fucking want to spend money trying to make sure that its planes don't crash so when they moved on to this version of like the 737 max right pilots famously got i think half an hour of ipad training and that maybe that might have been an hour of ipad training and and that training that they got on their ipad again not on a simulator didn't even have any information about the MCAS system that killed all these people. And the product of this was that on October 29th, 2019, a 737 MAX flying from Jakarta

crashed as the pilot was physically unable to fight the control stick. And that's another thing that's going on with this, with his decision to put power in the hands of software and not pilots is that mcas is also physically exerting control over the pilot stick and these people are trying to fight it and they're not able to fight it enough to stop the plane from tipping down and crashing into the ground and boeing runs this really like pretty racist campaign blaming this pilot who was not white for this error to try to you know cover up the fact that they fucking did this and this maybe would have worked except a few months later ethiopia air flight 302 went down and also killed everyone on board and you know all told this plane the boeing 737 max killed 346 people the seattle times which

broke a lot of the initial story said quote a variety of employees have described internal pressure to advance the max to completion as boeing hurried to catch up with the hot selling a320 from rival airbus mark rabin an engineer who did flight testing work unrelated to the flight controls, said there was always talk about how delays of even one day can cost substantial amounts. Meanwhile, staff were expected to stay in line, Rabin said. It was all about loyalty, Rabin said. I had managers tell me, don't rock the boat. You don't want to be upsetting executives. And I find this very funny because, again, the whole jack well strategy was to destroy the concept of loyalty to like boeing as a company but you have to be loyal to these shitty fucking executives because these executives you know have have all of the power in this company and they

want to make sure they can just wring out every single last drop of profit and if you upset them they're going to fire you and so the product of this is this process that we've seen which is that this plane isn't being designed by aircraft this is this is what happens when shareholders design an airplane and of course the 737 max continues to have problems right earlier this year famously the fucking door flew off in alaska air flight multiple whistleblowers have come forward to describe i mean just like all of the things that you would have expected from Boeing outsourcing shit to overworked and under trained contractors now

several of those whistleblowers have died when I was originally doing this I was considering basically making this episode just about the whistleblowers being killed but like I I don't know. I don't really have any more information than anyone else about these

deaths. So I'm just going to put on the record that if I go out here, it was murder. Yeah. And I think that the more important story is this one, because I think, I think at this point, everyone,

everyone kind of knows that something is wrong with Boeing. And every day we're getting more and more sort of specifics about every single part of this production process that, you know, used to be entirely run by highly paid, well, I mean, like, at least sort of highly paid and highly trained employees. That's now being run by a bunch of non-unionized underpaid contractors who are producing shitty equipment but what we're looking at here is boeing coming apart somewhat more famously i think the rescue flight is like being prepped but a bunch of astronauts have been stranded on the space station because boeing's launch craft was like veering off course there were a bunch of issues with it and so nasa just was just like no fuck this and the most hideously galling part of this entire story is that the craft that's going to pick up the astronauts is made by fucking spacex because

we have reached a point where an elon musk company is somehow designing rockets that are you know it's like designing spacecraft that are less likely to fucking explode than boeing that is that is an unbelievably depressing idea and to close i think we need to ask who killed these people because it's not just boeing jack welsh killed these people michael Milken killed these people. Ronald Reagan killed these people. And in a way, all of us killed them because none of us stopped them. And these people could have been stopped at any point in the process from Reagan to Stone Cipher to Kelly Ortberg. We could have stopped these people. To quote for a final time, David Graeber,

the ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. I add only this, if we don't make the world differently, people are going to die. Why should these murderers be allowed to run the world? We know how to make planes that don't fall out of the sky. The people who are fucking running this planet apparently don't. It shouldn't be enormously controversial to say that the people who know how to build airplanes should control how we fucking design and build airplanes. In the 19th and 20th century,

this idea was called worker self-management, and it was considered so dangerous that from Chile to Chiapas to Algeria to Hungary to Korea, capitalist, communist, and fascist alike killed anyone who dared believe it. But now, our choices are stark. We either let these people continue to drop planes out of the sky as the world burns and our cities sink into the sea, or we do something about it. So what are you going to do?

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys,

and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires from the chaotic world of generative ai to the destruction of google search better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose listen to better offline on

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Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.