If Ain't Boeing, I Am.... Going.

WTF, people, WTF. The company which once was a flagship of innovation and high quality is reduced to this? Seattle Times reports:

Last spring, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) managers approved removing a key feature of the 787 Dreamliner wing that aimed to protect it in the event of a lightning strike. Boeing’s design change, which reduces costs for the company and its airline customers, sped through despite firm objections raised by the agency’s own technical experts, who saw an increased risk of an explosion in the fuel tank inside the wing. That clash will come under scrutiny Wednesday as FAA Administrator Steve Dickson appears before a House committee examining the agency’s regulatory performance in the wake of the two Boeing 737 MAX crashes.

This is what happens when one allows MBAs to run a company--they will sure drive it into the ground. They surely did so with American economy as a whole. Cutting costs in aerospace means only one thing--people WILL die because of it. But as long as fat corporate cats are happy, who cares, right? I am NOT flying on B-787, period. Good ol' reliable B-747 and 777 only. 

FAA Administrator Dickson wrote to the committee on Friday insisting that “the design change had no unsafe features” and that the 787s produced since the removal of the copper foil from the wing skin are “currently safe to operate.” Still, in October, perhaps in response to the mounting criticism of its oversight role, the FAA seemed to take a step back. In a letter to Boeing, the agency’s airplane certification unit said the “cumulative effect of multiple issues” affecting the 787’s lightning protection — including the deliberate design changes, a sequence of Boeing manufacturing errors and the discovery that some lightning protection features proved inadequate in practice — raised concerns that the risk from a lightning strike is greater than the regulations allow.

You have got to be kidding me. In the last several years, the United States as a whole becomes increasingly reminiscent of a train flying off the rails on the flimsy bridge down into the river, with pieces and bits flying off in the process. One non-stop train wreck. Every single institution of the country seems to be in an implosion mode. 

Afghan War, which initially, after 9/11, I strongly supported understanding that the nest of Jihadists was there, turned into some kind of circus:

Bob Crowley, a retired Army colonel who served as a counterinsurgency adviser in Afghanistan in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers that at military headquarters in Kabul, “bad news was often stifled” because “the truth was rarely welcome.” “There was more freedom to share bad news if it was small—we’re running over kids with our MRAPs [armored vehicles] —because those things could be changed with policy directives,” he said. “But when we tried to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn’t welcome.” Military officials would create color-coded charts proclaiming their positive achievements, devoting an “inordinate amount of resources” to the endeavor, said John Garofano, a Naval War College strategist who advised Marines in Helmand province in 2011. “They had a really expensive machine that would print the really large pieces of paper like in a print shop,” he said. “There would be a caveat that these are not actually scientific figures, or this is not a scientific process behind this.” But it didn’t matter that the process wasn’t scientific, because no one bothered to question the numbers behind the charts anyway.

The funniest part in all that: unlike the US in 1980s during Soviet War in Afghanistan, Russia actually supported US operations there. All for naught, Russia will have to deal with this mess one way or another. And how else one is supposed to react to all this, when even such damning, and correct, conclusions barely make a dent in another BS of "impeachment" unfolding in a front of our eyes. 

After 18 years, encompassing three presidential administrations from both parties, no one has been held accountable for the vast U.S. taxpayer dollars—not to mention, blood, sweat, and tears—wasted on an exercise for a purpose that even the principle players seem unable to identify. These papers show a clear attempt to mislead and deceive the American people about the extent of the administrative and bureaucratic waste and incompetence that was occurring. What these interviews reveal is mind-blowing; that no one has been unaccountable is criminal.

Will anyone, ever get to be held responsible? If not, then the country is done. America's last test is the "impeachment" saga--if no one gets an indictment and spends the rest of their lives behind bars for treason, there will be nothing to fall back in the remnants of once proud Republic. It will be over because the system ceases to operate. What comes after is a whole other story altogether.