1

I became fascinated with airplanes when I was 13 and my family made a cross-country trip.

Our first flight was on a 720B to Chicago. I’d never heard of that plane. It was the 707 that was famous, the epitome of the jet age.

But on the tarmac I saw planes with three engines in the back, and found out they were the latest and greatest, they were 727s.

And on one leg of the trip we took a Lockheed that was not a jet, we were lucky to get on it, for there was an airline strike.

And then from L.A. to Phoenix we took a DC-9. With only two engines in the back. What I remember most about that flight was it jumped into the air very quickly.

And descended just about as fast.

Now Lockheed and Douglas ultimately released their own jets with three engines in the tail, to compete with the 727. But Lockheed’s L1011 was the last commercial plane the company built, they couldn’t compete with Boeing. As for what was then known as McDonnell Douglas…an engine fell off the DC-10, their version of the 727, and in the resulting financial mess, the company was sold to Boeing.

So only Boeing was left. It was the big kahuna. It won.

And we were proud of it.

But then there was a fakokta consortium formed to build the supersonic Concorde. It had an “e” at the end at the behest of the French, their British partners capitulated.

This was truly the jet age.

But when a tire blew out on the runway and the plane took a dive, the Concorde was sidelined and only Boeing was left.

But not really. A competitor emerged with the moniker “Airbus,” a consortium of European powers: France, Germany, Spain and Britain. A plane built by committee? We didn’t expect technological breakthroughs from the continent, those were the domain of the States. And calling it an AirBUS? We were in the jet age, flight was still relatively exotic. People might not have still dressed up, but they weren’t quite wearing shorts and flip-flops as they do today.

Then again, the reduction in sartorial fare coincided with the deregulation of the airlines, which caused a concomitant drop in the price of flights, and seemingly everybody took to the air thereafter.

2

Now the bumpiest flights I encounter are flying east, over the Rockies, to land in Denver. You’re cruising along, smoothly, looking down at the snow in the mountains and then…

The landscape immediately flattens out and this causes airflow to change dramatically, and as a result…if you’re afraid of turbulence, get ready for a white knuckle ride.

And on one of these flights, with the plane going sideways, wondering if we were even going to make the runway, my friend leaned over from the seat behind me and said:

“Freak out all you want, but the plane is never going to crash.”

And I embraced that. It’s carried me through a number of sketchy flights thereafter. Plane crashes used to be a regular feature. But now, it’s really only private craft. Until…

The 737 Max.

Now the 737 is a plane that was launched in the sixties. Relatively low to the ground, so you didn’t need jetways, you could just roll up a set of stairs. No one expected it to become a workhorse, to even fly cross-country, but it turned out carriers wanted smaller planes, not bigger ones. To the point where Airbus came out with the double-decker A380 and despite being the smoothest experience ever, it’s like flying on your living room couch, demand was de minimis and it went out of production.

Seeing that the demand had switched to smaller jets, Airbus created the A320. And other than on Southwest, which famously flies only 737s, you started to see them around.

But then Airbus saw the future, and created a smaller, more fuel-efficient version of the A320 called the A320neo, which was much more fuel-efficient.

And Boeing was caught flat-footed.

3

Covid taught me nobody is in control. The fact that the world runs at all is staggering to me.

But I was brought up to respect experts, my elders, and if you follow the business press, the biggest hero of the nineties was Jack Welch. The accolades were unending, he was the CEO of the century, making GE the most valuable company in America.

How did he do this?

I won’t quite say he cooked the books, but it’s something like that. He sold divisions that were not very profitable and got into finance.

But when the bubble burst…

If you follow GE, you know that today it is a shadow of what it once was. Slimmed down to nearly nonexistence to keep the company alive.

But back then… You could not stop hearing about Jack Welch.

And with all this publicity, corporations fought to hire those from his team. Which they did at Boeing.

It was utterly ridiculous. The headquarters was moved from Seattle to Chicago, and…corners were cut.

Like with the 737 MAX.

What Boeing needed to do was design a new plane from scratch. But that would cost billions and take years. Boeing had been asleep at the wheel. So, they decided to upgrade the 737 to compete, ergo the “MAX.”

Which was a technological marvel, but not in a good way. You see the new, bigger engines, had to sit more forward, and they threw off the balance of the plane, and as a result, software was needed to compensate for this.

But Boeing didn’t tell the government there was a big change, for that would require pilot-retraining, they wanted it to be easy.

Now this new software system was called MCAS. But everybody did not get the same system, you had to pay more for two sensors instead of one. Two created a fail-safe system. With only one…it could ice up and give false readings and the MCAS would take over and the pilots would be overwhelmed, if for no other reason than they weren’t trained for this, never mind having so little time to react, and the jet would crash.

Which happened twice.

4

Then it came out. Ad infinitum. Boeing had been cutting corners. They grounded the 737 MAX, And there was a deep dive and…

They found all kinds of flaws. Caused to a great degree by outsourcing production.

But it looked like the problems were finally solved, the planes took back to the air and then…

A door plug blew out.

And then an engine cowling fell off.

But Boeing blamed it on maintenance.

But really, you thought the company had changed.

But then you watch this documentary.

5

Actually, I wasn’t planning on seeing it, having followed the story so closely, but I came home from hiking one night and Felice was glued to the set, absolutely horrified, and you will be too.

Forget the workers who won’t fly on the planes they built.

Forget the details about mistakes that were not fixed. Metal shavings in the wires.

What really blew my mind about “Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing” was the culture.

And it’s not only in aircraft, it permeates American business and society. It’s all groupthink, you don’t want to be an individual in today’s world. And it’s as bad on the left as it is on the right. If you don’t adhere to the orthodoxy on trans rights and Israel, you’re pilloried by the left, even if you’re a Democrat. As for the other side, it’s all about paying fealty to Trump, no matter what he does.

But he’s a businessman…

AND THAT’S EXACTLY THE POINT!

Here you see it in action. These overpaid wankers employing financial engineering to make the stock price go up. After all, the reason a corporation exists is to reward the shareholders, right?

That’s cockamamie crap. That’s not the way it used to be. Then again, we no longer have supersonic commercial air travel and we haven’t landed a man on the moon in half a century. Today it’s all about wealth, and flaunting it.

Used to be you owned the company, and even if you were CEO, you felt a responsibility to your employees. No longer. You don’t want workers to unionize, and you’d rather not pay them benefits at all. It’s best if you can outsource the work, as Amazon does with its delivery drivers, so you can say it’s not your fault when it’s revealed these drivers are woefully undercompensated.

Look at AI… All the investments are off the books, so the stocks of Meta, et al, don’t fall. And then there’s Nvidia, on both sides of the deal, selling its chips to companies it’s got a stake in.

But the market keeps rolling along.

And if your holdings are in stock, you can borrow against them and not pay taxes! What a country!

So what we’ve got here is corporate brass doing everything in its power to lower costs and the quality control workers flagging the problems that result, whereupon they are ignored.

The worst thing is employees are afraid to go to HR. Because if you do, at best you’ll get reassigned, but there’s a good chance you’ll just be fired, and then good luck getting another job in the field.

But they use scrapped parts.

And the mistakes keep happening. I didn’t know about the problem with the faulty oxygen tanks. It is said that 25% of them don’t work. So, when the door plug blows out of the Alaska Air plane, fliers don their masks and…they don’t work.

6

Now you may or may not be following the latest news about football and CTE. One in four players will get it, if not more.

But our nation blindly champions the game.

This is like Russian Roulette. And I’ve got to ask you, do you feel lucky?

But the players get paid well (although few of them have guaranteed contracts, get hurt and you don’t get paid), and it’s their own choice.

But is it really?

That’s like me telling you to jump off the bridge. You might die, but if you don’t, I’ll pay you ten thousand dollars. Are you going to take that risk? And believe me, having CTE is worse than dying, which is why so many with the disease commit suicide. Being locked into a non-functioning body, one with pressure and pain, is just too much.

Just like it is standing up to the man. You can blow the whistle, but they’re going to put you through hell before there’s any change, never mind getting your reward.

And they don’t only question the work, but your complete identity.

So, you can watch this doc and ask yourself, what is better, to shut up and be the company man, overlook bad activity so you can maintain a paycheck…

Hell, that’s what we see in the music business. Everybody turns their head, especially when it comes to MeToo… Blow the whistle and you’ll never work in this industry again. Are you really going to take that risk?

7

We live in a two-tiered society, the haves and the have-nots. And the haves believe they’re smarter and are entitled to their riches, when this is usually not the case, if for no other reason than if the public doesn’t buy the product you’re going to go out of business, no matter how good it is.

And, in truth, with even a grifter President, who ignores the law with impunity, the average citizen no longer believes. They know the game is rigged against them. They know the winners are breaking the rules, so why shouldn’t they?

And if you say anything negative about Trump it’s like being on the left and not falling behind every tenet of democratic socialism… There can be no questioning involved. Either get with the program, or get out.

Now the reason I brought up the CTE study is how fast it was off the front page. With so much coming down the pike, worthy news falls by the wayside. Furthermore, there are those who no longer believe in facts and science, and if I die this week you know it will be from the flu shot I just got at Costco, that’s what many would say.

That’s the world we live in.

So I don’t have much hope that this Boeing documentary will have a big impact.

Because you just can’t fight the system. And if you try, it takes forever and you still may not win.

The corporate powers have deep pockets and can outlast you.

But if you watch “Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing,” you’re not going to be so complacent the next time you get on a Boeing plane.

But everybody else is!

That’s what they want you to think. But watching this documentary you discover that these are just time bombs in the sky.
But it’s nobody’s fault, except maybe yours. You can’t fly private. You should have known better than to get on the plane in the first place. And one thing is for sure, whatever happens, really no one is going to be held accountable.

That’d be a step in the right direction, if bad actors went to jail.

But they think they’re above that, that it’s an impossibility.

Hell, if you want to fight social media practices, don’t fine Meta a quarter of their net profit, put Mark Zuckerberg in jail.

But he went to Harvard and he’s rich, he’s inviolate.

And unfortunately, that’s the truth.