The 737 MAX Is Intrinsically Flawed, Misshaped, Software Won’t Fix It

Flawed aircraft have existed before in the history of aviation. There were actually more flawed types than successful ones, arguably starting with the first three plane models. They were made by Ader, a French engineer who, helped by military contracts, built the very first planes, coal powered planes inspired by bats (first flight, 1890 CE, 13 years before the Wright brothers…) However, the main problem of Ader was that the internal combustion engine was not mature enough yet, and his coal engines were too heavy. Plus his planes had to carry coal and water… That could be fixed, and was fixed.

Boeing, airlines and aviation authorities don’t have these excuses with the 737 MAX. With the 737 MAX, as with Brexit, that offending idiocy, now on its way to hell, as deserved, the cause is the same: the financialization of the world, its greedsterization, not to say gangsterization. Never before has a so obviously flawed plane type been ordered in such immense numbers (more than 5,000). This absurdity, an exit from reason, illustrates the world’s corruption. This is a world failure. A flying Titanic, loved by all, until it pogos around.

So why is the 737 MAX so flawed? Engine location. The engines are too powerful and too forward of the 737 Max’s wing.

World’s Third Plane, a program supported financially by the French military. The Franco-US engine CFM 56, the world’s most numerous jet engine (35,000 sold!), weights 2370 kg. An A320 weights around 100 tons. So its engines weight around 5%. In Ader’s plane, the engines, with the propellers, weighted 20% (nearly 50 kgs)… Another problem was the weight of the pilot… A lot in a 258 kgs plane…

What is stalling? Basically, when the plane threatens to stall, it’s because the angle of the plane in the air flow is too great, the nose is too much up. Stalling first increases lift, while, and because, it kills speed forward. After the speed goes down, the only way to stay up, is to augment the angle, killing more speed… hence the name: stalling. When speed forward dies too much, no up nose angle will provide lift, and the plane falls like a stone.

The way to prevent stalling is to increase forward speed. For that the engines are asked to produce more power. This was the general recommendation of the aviation authorities, worldwide. However, this can be a problem in two engine planes: their engines are located forward of the centers of mass and lift of the plane, and do not line up with those; instead, when they are all fired up, they exert a torque. That contributed to the crash of an Air France A330 in a terrible storm in the “pot au noir”.

The “pot au noir”, well-known to French aviation pioneers carrying mail to South America (like Saint Exupery, of Petit Prince fame), is the black stormy intertropical convergence zone halfway between Brazil and Africa, famous for his giant thunderstorms; the Air France plane flew into an enormous storm hiding an even larger one behind; the sensitive sensors freezed, and the plane went crazy; the pilots, bereft of any vision in the black and stormy night applied power as prescribed, and the plane stalled, unbeknownst to them. The accident surprised the aviation authorities, but shouldn’t have: there had been similar close calls before, but they had happened when pilots could see outside, and orient themselves (since then simpler orientation systems have been added).

There was plenty of blame to pass around, as for example the US FAA had insisted on Pivot tubes for the A330s which froze more readily, being of smaller diameter… (Pivot a French engineer invented the tubes named after him which enable to measure an aircraft’s speed.) After the Air France crash, recommendations to pilots were changed, worldwide: don’t just increase power, but keep the nose down. The AF447 crash was instructive because it told us how not to handle potential catastrophes…  

A Norwegian 737 Max. Norwegian, an excellent company, has 18 (eighteen) 737 Max. And another 100 on order. Norwegian is asking those Boeing financial Chicago types to foot the bill. The picture shows clearly the engines are way too far in front.

The problem of the 737 Max is that the engines are so disposed that the torque causing stalling is much larger than in any other two engined jet. Boeing is trying to fix this with software… but genius software can’t correct all and any bad hardware. No amount of software will allow a turkey to fly across an ocean…

Why did Boeing, one of a handful of top aerospace companies make such a mistake? Well, Boeing was born and thrived in Seattle. In recent years, though, it moved its headquarters to Chicago, to be closer to the source of all powers in this age of doom and gloom, finance. Uncontrolled finance is the deepest source of evil (yes, it financed Hitler, Stalin, as I have explained in other essays). It’s also the greatest source of leverage. One can imagine Boeing executives exchanging stupid American style jokes with financial types suggesting Boeing may as well make an unstable plane subject to stalling while in peril, and correct that with software: software at this point is what makes financial overlords ever more wealthy (and they distribute crumbs to politicians, or even to media plutocrats, who then try to Brexit us…).

But why was Boeing forced to make a plane subject to stalling from its intrinsic geometry? Airbus. (We told you the French invented the devil, and then shrugged!)

A few years back, Airbus observed that jet engines had vastly improved, getting 25% more mileage, or so. Thus it was irresistible to make a plane with such engines. Airbus workhorse is the A320, the first fly by wire plane (after the Franco-British Concorde, and then the Space Shuttle). The A320 program cost 3 billion dollars by 1984, the first customer was Air France, by February 2019, 8674 A320s had been built. Airbus is now fabricating sixty-three (63) A320, per week: nine planes every single day are churned out of Toulouse… (It’s roughly the only thing working really well in France…).

The new A320 was appropriately called the “Neo”. When Boeing saw the A320 Neo coming, it was petrified… Boeing couldn’t just slap new engines on the 737, as Airbus did with the A320 Neo. You see the new engines are more efficient because of a higher “bypass”, a huge hidden turbine which acts like a hidden propeller grabbing air and pushing it like a giant fan. That’s all around the jet engine itself, and makes the entire engine much bigger. The problem was that the 737 is short-legged. The A320 is long-legged, so it could accommodate the much bigger, higher bypass engines. But not so for the 737, which crawls on its belly like a snake.

Why couldn’t Boeing have slapped longer legs on the 737? Because it would have had to modify the fuselage, and the wing roots, big time. In other words, it would have had to make a brand new plane. A brand new plane cost more than ten billion dollars, and take years to come around. Plus, Boeing, Airbus style, was advertizing that the most modest of training, with a tablet and a bit of paper, was enough to transition a pilot from the 737 to the 737 Max. That was a complete lie, as the aerodynamics of the types are completely different.

There was a famous example of a flawed plane: the British Comet. The first commercial jet. Four of them exploded (my mom flew on them between the explosions). The cause was discovered by making metal fatigue tests on the ground. The high altitude was causing the aluminium fuselage to expand and contract, until it unzipped itself. That could, and was corrected. No Comet exploded afterwards, and all other jets profit from the Comet’s unfortunate pioneering.

The case of the 737 Max is obviously different: the plane simply looks, and is, wrong (no Trump will try to resist, that’s hard, and, although he may think it, may not tell you so in his next tweet…)    

This is a small example of how the financialization of the world, making everything into profit and soft talking, software, leads to unmitigated disaster. I don’t think the 737 Max can be saved. Sure, it can fly. But, in the same exact dire circumstances as a A320 Neo, it will crash when the European plane will not.

Financialization of the world is a strange madness, an aspect and tool of plutocratization, an even greater insanity. It started with Reagan, big time, was amplified by Clinton, and that boy, Obama, couldn’t express his admiration for Reagan enough. Now in France, an idiotic, pseudo socialist government (truly from Rothschild, as US president Andrew Jackson would enjoy to point out) want to sell the airports to private entities… Because anything private is superior, they say. Andrew Jackson knew better, and was very explicit about it.

It’s a category error, as Aristotle would point out (hopefully): greed is superior when no higher motives can be called upon. Greed is what you do, when you can’t call on the highest, more specifically human motivations. Greed motivates rats, or maybe monkeys. We humans fly higher. Just don’t try it in a 737 Max…

Patrice Ayme

PLUTOCRACY: EPIGENETICS, Not Just Wealth And Democide

CHOMSKY FINALLY Agrees With Patrice AYME: AMERICAN DREAM DIED BECAUSE OF PLUTOCRACY… But Chomsky does not go as far as using the word. And that makes him, and his devoted followers, miss the most sinister aspects of it all, and the reason why it is so hard to fix plutocracy, the EPIGENETICS OF EVIL. Thus they complain about the fleas, not the wolf carrying them. Details about how that instrument of US plutocracy, Nazism, came to be, thanks to US plutocracy and its banks, illustrate the demonstration: as long as something that big in the calculus of evil is altogether missed, there is little hope…

***

English America did start as a plutocracy in the sense of an extremely wealthy class of the wealthiest investors sitting in England, after having ravaged Ireland. Jamestown was like that, Yes, it was a tiny hamlet fortress, but then the colony grew, mostly from using slaves for tobacco farming. Then England, wrecked by civil wars and revolutions, lost control of its American colonies until the 1700s. Attempts to make Lord Penn the ruler of Pennsylvania ended up in the American Revolution.

Washington, Jefferson, and Al. were very wealthy and somewhat satanic, as they held slaves, and killed Natives, but they were small fry relative to blue blood European plutocrats, who were much wealthier, and thus had to be much more satanic to stay in power.

So the English American republic became a not very plutocratic republic (if one doesn’t consider slavery, and the massacre of Native Americans, two huge ifs…) And on it went. The rebellious Confederacy was to some extent a plutocratic revolt centered around the idea of buying, selling and abusing people as if they were chicken: it failed.

The first US billionaire was Carnegie. Carnegie was far left, by today’s standards, advocating 50% tax on the wealthy, and punishing estate taxes. His widely advocated ideas brought a mood conducive to the passage of the anti-trust act under President Teddy Roosevelt. Here is how the top 0.01%, the top 30,000, are doing in the USA:

Inequality Fosters Plutocracy, The Rule, Not Just Of Wealth, But evil & Bad Genes

So when did the US democracy go bad? JP Morgan, a banker, escaped the anti-trust thrust.   Dr. Schacht, a German banker cum economist joined the Dresdner Bank in 1903. In 1905, while on a business trip to the United States with board members of the Dresdner Bank, Schacht met the famous American banker J. P. Morgan, as well as U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt. Schacht  became deputy director of the Dresdner Bank from 1908 to 1915. Meanwhile, when Wall Street collapsed in 1907, JP Morgan “bought all of it” (or at least a big part of it), bringing the market around.

By 1914, US plutocrats, and the racist president Wilson, conspired with the German Kaiser, enabling the Kaiser to hope to destroy his personal enemy, and the enemy of German, if not American and British plutocracy, the French Republic. That magnificent plot backfired on Germany when Great Britain declared war to the Kaiser within days of its attack on France.

But it did not backfire for the USA, just the opposite: the US supported the Kaiser for three years with ammunition components, etc., while the UK and France piled up debts to the USA. More exactly, US plutocrats made a fortune, while putting the UK and the French Republic in their debt.

In 1919, US plutocrats made it so that German fascists could have another go at the French Republic, by brandishing, of all things, the concept of peace.

Remember, for US plutocrats, the motto of the French Republic, Liberty, EQUALITY… sounded like a funeral bell tolling. They absolutely had to remove that menace: at the time, the French empire was larger in population and extent, than the USA itself, and had the world’s most powerful army and air force (yes France was then mightier than the USA in several ways).

While arguing that Germany should be protected from France, the US requisitioned giant amounts of German private property, then transferred that, with characteristic generosity, to US plutocrats, finishing the deal, by burning the records of these chummy transactions, in a highly convenient blaze, which made the transfer of these properties safe from retrospective consideration. I am not joking: the cause of the burning of the Commerce Building on January 10, 1921 was never determined: rats, smoking were excluded, and electric wires kept new and perfect. The fire started in the file room, was all over said room in a couple of minutes, and lasted five hours.

In any case, the US became the de facto overlord of the so-called “Weimar Republic” (the official name was “Second German Reich”; Hitler changed it to “Third German Reich” in 1935). That enabled US plutocrats (some of them Jewish) to turn around the US antitrust law.

The symbiosis between Nazism and US plutocracy was total, including the latter giving birth to the former. Dr. Schacht was central in this (and that’s why he was judged and exonerated, as one of the top 24 Nazi war criminals in 1945 at Nuremberg).

To win the war, the US became, de facto, a sort of social democracy. It slowly went back to plutocracy when Nazi operators and collaborators such as the Dulles brothers, took control of the USA in the 1950s. A quick learner and follower, Richard Nixon, became president in 1969, setting up the HMO system, while making an alliance with the Chinese dictatorship.

Ford, Carter, Reagan, ramped up the plutocratic pressure. The dam broke under Clinton, who actually dismantled the MOST IMPORTANT legislative piece of president Franklin D Roosevelt’s long presidency: the Banking Act of 1933 (“Glass Steagall”).

The Deep State, suitably plutocratized then established a number of evil corporations which were used as intelligence agencies (internally and externally). This is when Sheryl Sandberg was parachuted from the Treasury Department where she was the official girlfriend of Lawrence Summers (successor of R. Rubin, ex- Goldman Sachs chair) to Google and then Facebook (she will meet with Trump Wednesday).

Inequality grew.

***

Chomsky, A Crow On Its MIT Branch, Crowing Lugubriously:

That was for the causes. Chomsky started to condemn the “financialization” of the USA for the acceleration of inequality in 2013, under Obama (Patrice Ayme explained that it was caused by the abrogation of the Banking Act, already more than 10 years ago; Chomsky vaguely describes, Patrice explains…).

Here is Chomsky’s latest description: “The ‘American Dream’ was all about class mobility. You were born poor, but could get out of poverty through hard work and provide a better future for your children. It was possible for [some workers] to find a decent-paying job, buy a home, a car and pay for a kid’s education… It’s all collapsed — and we shouldn’t have too many illusions about when it was partially real… The so-called American Dream was always based partly in myth and partly in reality.” Chomsky said, noting that Americans are losing their hope due to “stagnating incomes, declining living standards, outrageous student debt levels, and hard-to-come-by decent-paying jobs.”

“The inequality in the contemporary period is almost unprecedented. If you look at total inequality, it ranks amongst the worse periods of American history… However, if you look at inequality more closely, you see that it comes from wealth that is in the hands of a tiny sector of the population…

The current period is extreme because inequality comes from super wealth. Literally, the top one-tenth of a percent are just super wealthy,”

Chomsky describes. One of my trusted commenters asked me recently what I thought of Chomsky. A philosopher is not just a botanist. A philosopher would explain, and suggest new explanations. Chomsky also avoid to use the concept of “plutocracy”. He describes it, he describes how wealth, being powerful, grabs power… But he doesn’t label it… which prevents him to go at the bottom of things, as he usually focus on “imperialism”… a completely different notion (imperium, that is military command, may happen with or without plutocracy; initially the concept was from the Roman Republic, which was not a plutocracy). 

***

Plutocracy, Epigenetics of Evil:

However, that comes short. Very short. Chomsky does not dare to cross the semantic Rubicon of calling it for what it is, plutocracy, the evil power, the genetics, and epigenetics, of evil.

This is why Chomsky clings to the idea that the American Founders debated what is at stake now. Now, they did not: the Internet has changed everything, starting with the minds, the moods, hence the genes, or the genetic expressions, to be a bit more precise. We know that fishes in a changed environment, change genetically. Females can become not just males, but super males.

Plutocracy is not just the rule of wealth. We know, from studying epigenetics in other species, that animal behavior influences genetic, let alone neurohormonal expression.

The absolute power of enormous wealth does not just corrupt absolutely, it corrupts genetically.  

Complaining about the fleas is good, but seeing the wolf carrying them, better. Wisdom is not just about seeing what’s wrong, but doing better what can be improved.

Patrice Ayme’