“It’s as if I’m watching a troubled child” is how Captain Dennis Tajer describes flying a Boeing 737 Max.

“The culture at Boeing has been toxic to trust for over a decade now,” (Adam Dickson, a former senior manager at Boeing) says.

Five years ago Boeing faced one of the biggest scandals in its history, after two brand new 737 Max planes were lost in almost identical accidents that cost 346 lives.

The cause was flawed flight control software, details of which it was accused of deliberately concealing from regulators.

Meanwhile, further evidence of how production problems could endanger safety emerged this week.

The FAA warned that improperly installed wiring bundles on 737 Max planes could become damaged, leading to controls on the wings deploying unexpectedly, and making the aircraft start to roll.

If not addressed, it said, this “could result in loss of control of the airplane”. Hundreds of planes already in service will have to be checked as a result.

  • Sagrotan@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    The founder, William Boeing, was a a white segregationist, active against mixed racial marriages, believed in the pure white blood and shit. His parents were Austrian/ German, Böing. America, the land of opportunity.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Sure, and Henry Ford was an out-and-out antisemite who published a newspaper where he serialized the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Hitler kept a photo of him on his desk.

      That doesn’t mean we should expect Ford cars to fall apart on the road.

      It’s way too late to be pissed off about William Boeing or Henry Ford. Or Hugo Boss or Ferdinand Porsche, who directly worked with the Nazis.

      Or IBM or the Coca-Cola company, which did too.

      Etc.

      • SuperDuper@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Henry Ford is also the reason kids learn square dancing in school. I actually had to learn how to dance like a hillbilly in gym class because some long-dead antisemite was once convinced that jazz music and the Charleston (read: black people and anything cultural that they contribute) would corrupt the youth, who could only be saved by the purity of barnyard dancing.

        I don’t know how this contributes to the conversation at hand, but I think about it a lot.

          • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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            8 months ago

            Swing your partner round and round,
            Pick her up and throw her down.

            Makes sense given the crowd.

            • Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              8 months ago

              That was my grade school experience as well. Even as a child I was confused by how much square dancing they made us do and absolutely no other forms of dance.

              • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                Yes, it’s truly wild how often things in the United States often originate from a fascistic or cultish source. Daylight savings time, cereal, etc. granted it’s been almost 40 years. I don’t know if they still do it. But they did back in the '70s and '80s for sure. But with all the satanic panic of the '90s I doubt they started pushing it any less LOL.

                  • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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                    8 months ago

                    Initially it was called war time. And it was even used even in Europe from WWI through WWII. But post WWII most abandoned it. Including the United States. It had nothing to do with farmers. They’re actually one of the groups most against it.

                    It was standardized in the United States in 1966 at the behest of wealthy retailers who lobbied the government. Believing the extra hour of daylight correlated in some meaningful way to increased sales. It didn’t. But that was the rationale.

                    The most recent changes to DST, pushing it to the first of November. Happened in the late 2010’s. Largely pushed for by candy makers/retailers, again claiming it would boost sales and somehow be safer. (Halloween)

            • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
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              8 months ago

              That’s sad, in my elementary school we learned square dancing, but also the Mexican Hat Dance and Tinikling and the Polka, I can’t remember if there were others since it was back in the 1960s. I think learning the Charleston would have been fun! When I taught 2nd grade, dance wasn’t part of PE but for a countries around the world assembly I taught my class some Russian (and, now I know better, some of it was Ukrainian) folk dances I had learned from my Russian ballet teacher. They got a kick out of it.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I mean it’s too late to expect people to blame the problems of the companies on that.

          My dad used to refuse to buy VW cars because “the Beetle was designed by Hitler.” As if money to Volskwagen went back in time to the Nazi coffers. He didn’t have anything to say about the emissions scandal.

          Edit: It would be like blaming Steve Jobs for any bad thing Apple has done since he died as if it were his fault and not Tim Cook’s.

        • arefx@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          Sure but we can’t automatically blame the people alive today for something that happened long before they were around, lol

      • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        Coca Cola?

        From what I understand they severed all business with Germany when the war started and because of this Germany had to start making Fanta.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Coca-Cola didn’t officially sever ties until 1941, when America entered the war, not when it started. Fanta was manufactured by Coca-Cola’s facilities in Nazi Germany with the full expectation that those facilities would re-merge with Coca-Cola when the war was over. And guess what happened when the war was over?

          • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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            8 months ago

            Well yeah the bottling plants were the property of Coca-Cola before the war. After the war it would be expected that property would be returned to Coca Cola. Bottling plants are physical things that couldn’t be instantly teleported from Germany when Germany declared war on the US, so they continued to operate. The existence of Fanta proves that Coca Cola didn’t support the bottling plants in Germany, not evidence they were colluding with the Nazi government. If they were secretly supplying those bottling plants they would’ve been able to continue producing Coca Cola and Fanta wouldn’t exist.

            Yes Coca Cola existed in the same time period as the Nazis. Maybe they should’ve stopped doing business with Germany earlier. But the idea that a business is going to push political ideals seems like an unreasonable expectation. There’s no clear path for a business on this other than following the law which Coca Cola did. The real question should be about why the US government didn’t impose sanctions on Germany earlier for their horrible politics. It’s really elected governments that should decide foreign policy, not private entities.

              • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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                8 months ago

                You’re point being that anyone that people in the past should have known the future?

                History is like a mystery novel where you’ve read the last chapter first. People in the past didn’t immediately think Nazi=bad like we do today. The full extent of how evil they were hadn’t happened yet. Remember there are many things that you’re associated with now that in the future will be seen as monstrous.

                Right now there are many acts of violence towards Jews by certain movements. How careful have you been in making sure you have no associations with that?

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                  8 months ago

                  No, my point was that the antisemitism of Henry Ford (and other issues there) have no bearing on the problems their companies are responsible for today.

                  And do tell me, and I’m Jewish incidentally, how to disassociate myself from violence towards Jews.

    • SolidGrue@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Be that as it may, Boeing himself was a stickler for quality and set a vision of quality and excellence that made Boeing aircraft some of the safest in the fleet, up until their merger with McDonnell Douglas. It was said he’d rather go out of business than ship a shoddy product.

      The corporation isn’t the person. That’s sort of the point.

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      That has little to nothing to do with the current state of affairs at Boeing. The current situation was brought about by the merger between Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, with the MDD executives joining Boeing’s board of directors and continuing the same shitty behaviour. Eg, with the MD-10 and its cargo door, the issue was raised at design stage, denied until after 2 massive fatal accidents occurred, and then they tried to get around it with “gentleman’s agreements” with the FAA - just like with the MCAS issue on the 737 MAX.

      The problems can be pinned down to a very small number of executives, who belong in prison.

      • HobbitFoot
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        8 months ago

        And part of the problem is that McDonnell Douglas left the commercial aviation market because they couldn’t compete with Boeing.

    • saltesc@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Are you asserting 737 Max issues and the latency to mechanically resolve them is caused by a family legacy of white supremacy haunting the board rooms of present day Boeing HQ?

      Because I otherwise don’t see your point in the context of this article and news.

      • El Barto@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I don’t see the point either, though it’s an interesting (and sad) piece of trivia, which I didn’t know.