Tag Archives: responsibilities

Testing

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Boeing is going to be unable to return its 737MAX to commercial flight before 2020; the current latest guess is January, and that’s likely to slip.

Fixing the Boeing Co 737 MAX’s hazardous flight-control software and completing other steps to start carrying passengers is likely to stretch into 2020, an increasing number of government and industry officials say, even as the company strives to get its jet back into service still this year.
The situation remains fluid, no firm timeline has been established and Boeing still has to satisfy US regulators that it has answered all outstanding safety questions.
…
Boeing executives, FAA engineers, and international aviation regulators have steadily expanded their safety analyses to cover a growing list of issues spanning everything from emergency recovery procedures to potentially suspect electronic components.

That pretty much says it all.  Boeing needs to stop taking short cuts—legitimate as those might seem, and are in a variety of cases—and test this aircraft from the ground up as though every component in the control system were newly developed and never before tested.  “Every,” here, means physical components, electronic components, and software.  And pilots: their understanding of and interaction with the control systems, and with their training and operating manuals, needs to be evaluated de novo, also, as the Ethiopian crash suggests.

Too much of this stuff have not interacted with each other before in this particular aircraft, and even those components of subsystems and those subsystems themselves that have interacted within themselves have not, necessarily, interacted with other components and subsystems.

It would, in fact, be a good idea to do this from-the-ground-up retesting as a matter of routine whenever there’s a major software or hardware update to the aircraft.  Those updates create a nearly new aircraft, and accumulating changes in performance, however subtle or seemingly minor, can falsify a number of underlying assumptions and add up to large failures.

In the present case, the bit-by-bit testing is not saving much money, either.

It’s a Start

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Germany has shown, with its welching on its commitment to spend 2% of its GDP on bolstering NATO, that it has no interest in Europe’s mutual defense.  That, though, does not alter the threat to European security represented by Russia other than to increase it.

I’m reminded of a remark President Abraham Lincoln made about General George McClellan and the army the latter commanded: If McClellan does not want to use the army, I should like to borrow it a while.  Since Germany isn’t interested in Europe’s defense, isn’t even interested in getting up a serious defense establishment of any sort (McClellan was strongly interested in this much), our forces are better placed elsewhere.

Enter Poland, which sits on the front line of the threat and has only just gotten out from under the Russian jackboot.

President Trump signed an agreement to send 1,000 additional US troops to Poland while treating his visiting Polish counterpart to a military flyover at the White House as thanks for a commitment to buy F-35 jet fighters.

Trump also suggested that those soldiers could come from the contingent—52,000 of them—currently based in Germany.  After all, Germany isn’t using them.

This should only be a start, though.  We need to be working toward a NATO-like mutual defense treaty that involves the eastern European nations, Great Britain, and us to work in parallel with, and perhaps eventually to supplant, NATO.

Foolishness

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In response to a Wall Street Journal editorial on Scot Peterson, the cop who stood outside and listened to the butchery going on inside a Florida school, a Letter to the Editor writer had this to say:

Your editorial leaves out of the discussion how outgunned Scot Peterson and his fellow sheriff’s deputies were against shooter Nikolas Cruz with his AR-15 rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. I wonder how many Journal readers (and writers) would have confronted the shooter while bringing a metaphorical knife to a gunfight.

This is just foolish and ignorant along a couple of dimensions.  For one thing, Journal readers (and writers), in the main, are not trained for such dangers and associated risks, the way policemen are.  This is a foolish comparison to make.  The foolishness is illustrated by trained, but wholly unarmed, American men on a French train who defeated and subdued a semi-automatic rifle-armed terrorist.

For another thing, Peterson, and his fellows who arrived as soon as they could, were not seriously outgunned, for all that they had semi-automatic pistols against the butcher’s semi-automatic rifle.  The two types of weapons have similar rates of fire, although the rifle does have a slightly faster one.  Beyond that, the rifle’s primary advantage over pistols is its greater range. That range advantage was greatly reduced—virtually eliminated—in the confined fields of fire available inside a building.

In the end, these slight advantages would have been eliminated by a prompt, determined response and the surprise factor involved.  The advantages would have been reversed entirely by the numbers of police entering as promptly as they could, producing a variety of firing origins against the single point of the butcher.

And in the event, I would expect at least a fraction of (hypothetical) Journal readers (and writers) who might have been on scene to attack the butcher rather than try to duck away.  The folks on scene at the start of an event are, after all, the first responders.

An Out of Control Supreme Court Justice

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I received this email from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee last Thursday [emphasis added].

E —
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has a powerful message about reproductive rights that every grassroots Democrat needs to hear:
“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When Government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”
E, if you agree with Justice Ginsburg that women should be able to make their own health care choices, add your name now >>
Republican legislatures nationwide have spent the last few weeks passing extreme abortion laws, with the goal of getting the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade.
But people are speaking out, fighting back, and holding rallies across the country with a clear message for Republicans: We won’t tolerate these attacks on women’s reproductive rights. As Justice Ginsburg says, women should be able to make their own decisions about their reproductive care.
Add your name now to stand with Ruth Bader Ginsburg if you agree that women should be able to make their own health care choices:
http://www.dscc.org/Stand-With-RBG
Thanks,
Team DSCC

The emphasized quote is what then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Ruth Bader Ginsburg said at her confirmation hearing.

There are a couple of things terribly wrong here. One is the plain pre-judging Ginsburg revealed then, her decision to announce what her ruling would be on any future abortion-related case that might come before the Court.  (Never mind that her pre-determined opinion entirely writes off the human right of a baby to its well-being and dignity, its right to live.)

But the other, even worse, if that’s possible, thing is a sitting Supreme Court Justice actively participating in politics—not in her personal role as citizen, but in her judicial role as Supreme Court Justice (of course, Ginsburg has a history of this with her disparaging statements about then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump).

Ginsburg has permitted a political campaign facility to use her statement in today’s political environment without that quote being noted as from that confirmation hearing.  Ginsburg has permitted the DSCC to imply that this is a current statement and that a sitting Justice has taken sides in a political contest.

That behavior is despicable.

Much Ado About Another Nothing

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The claim, now, is that atmospheric CO2 has reached 415 parts per million (ppm), according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

That is, as the panicky scream goes, the highest level ever in human history.

And

Earth science analyses show that the atmosphere last contained this much CO2 some three million years ago, when global sea levels were higher and parts of Antarctica were blanketed in forest.

There’s a hint there regarding the lushness of life on Earth.

Sadly, a couple of things are being ignored by the climatistas.  One is that the only outcome of sea levels being higher is that humans living on the coast will be inconvenienced by having to move inland, neverminding that they’ll be able to continue their coastal lives.

The other thing is that in those 3 million years since, we’ve had a very severe ice age and several 40,000-100,000-year cycles of glaciation, the latest one of which ended only about 10,000 years ago—and we’ve not recovered yet: we’re still a few degrees below the geologic global warming trend line.

But there’s money in that manufactured hysteria.