#who wrote demanding to know whether the pilots who said they would not report for future reserve duty had refused to take part in the war? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nataliesnews · 4 months

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It is a very sad day. Veronica phoned me this morning to tell me that Uta's mother had died after a long illness. I spoke to her just a few days ago and she knew she was dying and was so brave. I am glad that I had the opportunity of meeting her, even if only for a few days and since then we have been in touch all the time. I often thought of her when I was writing my letters and wondering what she thought.

Then yesterday too my friend's grandson was mortally wounded. He has particles in his brain and there does not seem to be much hope. It was only the other day that I had supper with her and Robbie and she said that she does not sleep at night. That it would break them if something happened to him .

I can think of nothing positive happening in my life. Then I read of our president whom I realise does not have a brain in his head. He signs a rocket which is going to kill people as if he were writing on someone's bandages leg or knee? And then there are people who laugh at their sufferings.

It is getting harder and harder to write. woman Orit Stroch. a settler, who wrote demanding to know whether the pilots who said they would not report for future reserve duty had refused to take part in the war? By the way she is also the one who said that no doctor should have to treat anyone from the gay community if it conflicted with their religious beliefs. And for support which Netanyahu gave the general who replied to her read the attached

Outrage as far-right minister suggests some pilots refusing air support for Gaza troops

Settlements Minister Orit Strock widely reported to ask at cabinet if some in Air Force are failing to carry out their duties for ideological reasons

Today the Jerusalem municipality came to the tent of the families and took down and tore all their signs and a bunch of hooligans came past screaming that all the families are traitors and caused the death of their children and the war and that piece of shit whose two sons cower behind them is quiet. That is Israel today of Netanyahu.

After a long interval because of the war, we had not been to the DCO and decided to go. We were surprised to find about 15 men there. They had all been summoned by the ISA, the secret service. One indignantly told us that he had to pull his trousers down to his ankles and did not know why. They also told us that the Satmar cult comes into their neighborhoods with the Palestinian flag with no problem. They were all very pleasant.

We then decided to see what is happening at the entrance to Beit Lechem from road 60. Until the war the road was completely open but this is the way it looks now. We stopped a short distance before the checkpoint.

Shlomit got out to photograph and immediately a soldier came running up demanding our IDs. We told him we only have to show IDs to a policeman and when he said he was also a policeman asked to be shown identification. Also , as we were on the main road of the town and not in the area of the checkpoint, to be shown proof that where we were standing was a closed army area. He claimed that we had photographed him and said that it was easy to identify him....I leave that to your judgement,He said he would phone the police and we said to be our guest. I said to Shlomit that it was just as well we had not driven off before we saw him approaching us as in this day and age he would probably have taken a shot at us. But all's well that ends well....He had evidently phoned the representative of the DCO. He knew us from former days at Etzion and we showed him the photo which he did not ask to have deleted and after a short and pleasant conversation continued on our way home.

Today we went to plant trees with one of the farmers from Burin. Not that I could help but I go to identify. This is how the others went up. Her ladyship went up by taxi. i don't think it is the help which is important but that we come. We left early though as the Palestinian authority phoned and said that the area was getting restless and we should go and then too soldiers and settlers started coming down the mountain. But people bought a lot of his olives and olive oil. I asked where his family was ...usually it is very joyous there and the house was so empty but he said it was too dangerous from them to be there so they had gone to live in the village.

But then we also have this......I remember how Israelis said what animals the Palestinians are that whenever there was an attack on Israelis they would go out to celebrate and give out sweets. Evidently Israelis are also keen to learn from Palestinians as this is what some soldiers did.... singing and dancing in the street and giving out sweets at the death of one of the Hamas. Not that I feel any grief for him but this is not the Jewish way. But today I no longer think that there is a Jewish way. I think we have learned only too well of how to hate and how to conduct pogroms. They should remember the Peisach seder where God rebukes his angels for singing when the Egyptians drowned.

and this caricature appeared in one of the far right newspapers. If it had been from a newspaper on the left or a journalist/ whoever published it would already be sitting in jail/ If you want to know what this is about look at the pdf below. It is too complicated for me to go into it.

Sorry I wish I could write something positive

Henrietta Szold 2

Migdal Nofim Room 708

Kiryat Hayovel

Jerusalem 9650230

Israel

Tel 0528-375593

Nofim Tel 972-(0)2-6580222

Home 972 (2)6418387 no messages

Outrage as far-right minister suggests some pilots refusing air support for Gaza troops

Settlements Minister Orit Strock widely reported to ask at cabinet if some in Air Force are failing to carry out their duties for ideological reasons

Sorry I wish I could write something positive

Henrietta Szold 2

Migdal Nofim Room 708

Kiryat Hayovel

Jerusalem 9650230

Israel

Tel 0528-375593

Nofim Tel 972-(0)2-6580222

Home 972 (2)6418387 no messages

#It is a very sad day. Veronica phoned me this morning to tell me that Uta's mother had died after a long illness. I spoke to her just a few #even if only for a few days and since then we have been in touch all the time. I often thought of her when I was writing my letters and won #Then yesterday too my friend's grandson was mortally wounded. He has particles in his brain and there does not seem to be much hope. It wa #I can think of nothing positive happening in my life. Then I read of our president whom I realise does not have a brain in his head. He si #It is getting harder and harder to write. woman Orit Stroch. a settler #who wrote demanding to know whether the pilots who said they would not report for future reserve duty had refused to take part in the war?#Outrage as far-right minister suggests some pilots refusing air support for Gaza troops #Settlements Minister Orit Strock widely reported to ask at cabinet if some in Air Force are failing to carry out their duties for ideologic #https://www.timesofisrael.com/outrage-after-far-right-minister-suggests-some-pilots-refusing-to-support-gaza-troops #Today the Jerusalem municipality came to the tent of the families and took down and tore all their signs and a bunch of hooligans came pa #https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/crime-in-israel/article-779881 #779881 #After a long interval because of the war #we had not been to the DCO and decided to go. We were surprised to find about 15 men there. They had all been summoned by the ISA #the secret service. One indignantly told us that he had to pull his trousers down to his ankles and did not know why. They also told us tha #We then decided to see what is happening at the entrance to Beit Lechem from road 60. Until the war the road was completely open but this i #Shlomit got out to photograph and immediately a soldier came running up demanding our IDs. We told him we only have to show IDs to a police #as we were on the main road of the town and not in the area of the checkpoint #to be shown proof that where we were standing was a closed army area. He claimed that we had photographed him and said that it was easy to #He said he would phone the police and we said to be our guest. I said to Shlomit that it was just as well we had not driven off before we #Today we went to plant trees with one of the farmers from Burin. Not that I could help but I go to identify. This is how the others went up #But then we also have this......I remember how Israelis said what animals the Palestinians are that whenever there was an attack on Israeli #and this caricature appeared in one of the far right newspapers. If it had been from a newspaper on the left or a journalist/ whoever publ #Sorry I wish I could write something positive #Henrietta Szold 2 #Migdal Nofim Room 708 #Kiryat Hayovel #Jerusalem 9650230 #Israel #Tel 0528-375593

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deniscollins · 5 years

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Boeing C.E.O. Knew About Pilot’s Warnings Before Second Crash

If you were CEO of Boeing, and after the Boeing 737 Max plane crashed killing 189 people in Indonesia you remembered that a top pilot had voiced concerns about the plane while it was in development, what would you do: (1) refuse to allow the plane to fly, (2) allow the plane to continue flying but initiate an investigation in the top pilot’s concern, or (3) something else? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Boeing’s chief executive faced the grieving relatives of two deadly crashes of its 737 Max jet at an emotional congressional hearing on Tuesday, as senators pummeled him with questions about whether the company should have grounded the plane before the second accident. At times looking shaken, the executive, Dennis A. Muilenburg, said that if he could do it over again, he would have acted after the first crash, off the coast of Indonesia last October. “If we knew everything back then that we know now, we would have made a different decision,” he testified. He said Boeing officials had asked themselves “over and over” again why they didn’t ground the plane sooner.

“I think about you and your loved ones every day,” Mr. Muilenburg told the families, who at one point stood behind him holding up large photographs of the dead.

Still, Mr. Muilenburg acknowledged for the first time that he knew before the second crash that a top pilot had voiced concerns about the plane while it was in development.

The admission will most likely lead to more questions about why Boeing did not act more decisively before that crash, of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, on March 10.

Two days later, Mr. Muilenburg called President Trump to defend the safety of the Max. The plane was grounded, however, on March 13, although the United States waited longer than most countries to act.

The two accidents killed 346 people and have thrown the company into crisis and roiled the global aviation industry.

Mr. Muilenburg, who had spent weeks preparing for his appearance, was measured throughout more than two hours of testimony. He mostly avoided being cornered by senators’ lines of questioning, and declined to agree to demands that he endorse proposals to reform aviation laws.

The hearing was held on the first anniversary of the crash of Lion Air Flight 610, in Indonesia. The mood in the hearing room was tense. Multiple senators asked Mr. Muilenburg to address families of crash victims seated behind him.

The chief executive, who has been criticized for failing to convey sympathy after the crashes, apologized to the families directly in his opening remarks.

“We are sorry,” he said. “Deeply and truly sorry.”

During several tense exchanges, senators on the commerce committee sharply criticized Boeing’s handling of the situation. Mr. Muilenburg said in opening remarks that the company had “made mistakes” and he vowed to redouble its focus on safety.

Boeing faces multiple federal investigations into the design of the plane, including a criminal inquiry led by the Justice Department.

Among the most intense rounds of questioning concerned messages that a pilot central to the development of the Max sent to a colleague in November 2016, months before the plane was certified by regulators. The pilot, Mark Forkner, said in the messages that he had “unknowingly” lied to the F.A.A. about a new automated system, which was “running rampant” in the flight simulator and causing him trouble.

The system, designed to help avoid stalls, ultimately contributed to both crashes. Known as MCAS, the software triggered erroneously on faulty data, sending the planes into irrecoverable nose-dives.

Boeing provided Mr. Forkner’s messages to the Justice Department in February, though it did not give them to lawmakers or the F.A.A. until this month.

Mr. Muilenburg said he became aware of the messages “prior to the second crash.”

In January 2017, two months after his exchange with a colleague, Mr. Forkner sent an email to the F.A.A. reiterating an earlier request that the regulator remove mention of MCAS from pilot training materials.

“Delete MCAS,” Mr. Forkner wrote in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times. He described the system as “way outside the normal operating envelope,” meaning that it would activate only in rare situations that pilots would almost never encounter in normal passenger flights.

Mr. Muilenburg said he “didn’t see the details of this exchange until recently.” He added that the company was “not sure” what the pilot meant in the messages to his colleague, and noted that the company had not been able to speak to Mr. Forkner, who now works for Southwest Airlines.

“You’re the C.E.O., the buck stops with you,” said Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, adding, “How did you not in February set out a nine-alarm fire to say ‘we need to figure out exactly what happened,’ not after all the hearings, not after the pressure but because 346 people have died and we don’t want another person to die?”

Mr. Muilenburg, who appeared alongside Boeing’s chief engineer, John Hamilton, remained stoic as lawmakers took turns jabbing at the company and its signature airplane. The senators pressed Mr. Muilenburg to account for seemingly lax oversight by the F.A.A., haranguing him about the close relationship between the aerospace giant and its regulator.

In a report released this month, Indonesian investigators said that errors by the flight and maintenance crew contributed to the crash. But they blamed Boeing for designing a system that triggered repeatedly based on a single sensor and failing to notify pilots that it existed. A task force of nine international regulators said in a separate report that Boeing never fully explained the system to regulators, who relied heavily on the company to help certify the plane and did not have the expertise in place to adequately assess the information it did receive.

An earlier investigation, by the National Transportation Safety Board, found that the company had underestimated the effect that a malfunction of MCAS would have on the cockpit, wrongly assuming that pilots would immediately counteract an erroneous firing.

As the 737 Max was developed, Boeing employees working on behalf of the F.A.A., not government inspectors, signed off on many aspects of the plane. This system of so-called delegation, which lets manufacturers approve their own work, is now under scrutiny.

Boeing employees in its Seattle-area and Charleston, S.C., plants have said they sometimes felt pressure to meet deadlines while conducting safety approvals. Investigations by The New York Times have revealed that key F.A.A. officials didn’t fully understand MCAS and that the regulator at times deferred to the company, making decisions based on how much they would cost Boeing and its production schedule.

“Boeing lobbied Congress for more delegation and now we have to reverse that delegation,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said, referring to the company’s push to pass legislation that undercuts the role of the F.A.A. in approving airplanes.

“I would walk before I was to get on a 737 Max,” said Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, adding, “You shouldn’t be cutting corners, and I see corners being cut.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Muilenburg will appear in front of the House transportation committee, which has been leading the congressional investigation into the Max and is expected to adopt an even more adversarial stance. His appearances mark the first time a Boeing executive has addressed Congress about the crashes.

Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and the chairman of the transportation committee, will add a new piece of information, saying that Boeing engineers at one point proposed placing an MCAS alert inside the cockpit, according to a copy of his opening statement. No such alert was ever installed, though, and Mr. DeFazio plans to press Mr. Muilenburg on why that decision was made.

Inside Boeing, Mr. Muilenburg’s performance in front of Congress is seen as a key test of whether he will remain in his post as chief executive, as the board weighs further management changes.

This month, Boeing dismissed the executive in charge of its commercial division, Kevin McAllister, and stripped Mr. Muilenburg of his title as chairman, in a sign that the board is moving more urgently toward holding senior leadership accountable for the crisis.

Nadia Milleron, whose daughter Samya Stumo died in the Ethiopia crash, sat three rows behind Mr. Muilenburg at the hearing and said she believed “he should resign" and “the whole board should resign.”

As Mr. Muilenburg left the room at the end of his testimony, Ms. Milleron asked him to “turn and look at people when you say you’re sorry.”

He turned around and looked her in the eye.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

#Boeing

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multipleservicelisting · 3 years

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More Arrests Made Amid New Calls for Investigation of Capitol Attack

One week after an angry mob stormed the Capitol, Congress struggled on Wednesday to make sense of the most serious incursion on its home in more than two centuries as lawmakers called for new investigations and federal authorities fanned out across the country, taking into custody several more suspects, including two police officers from Virginia and a firefighter from Florida.

The flurry of arrests and appeals for inquiry came as the House brought a historic second impeachment charge against President Trump and federal law enforcement officials continued to examine whether the assault on the Capitol included coordinated efforts by small groups of extremists and was not merely a mass protest that spiraled out of control. All of this took place as official Washington remained in a defensive crouch, with much of the city surrounded by protective fencing and armed troops camped inside the Capitol complex.

Led by Representative Mikie Sherrill, a New Jersey Democrat and former Navy pilot, more than 30 lawmakers called on Wednesday for an investigation into visitors’ access to the Capitol on the day before the riot. In a letter to the acting House and Senate sergeants-at-arms and the U.S. Capitol Police, the lawmakers, many of whom served in the military and said they were trained to “recognize suspicious activity,” demanded answers about what they described as an “extremely high number of outside groups” let into the Capitol on Jan. 5 at a time when most tours were restricted because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Separately, the inspector general’s office of the Capitol Police said it was opening a potentially wide-ranging inquiry into security breaches connected to the siege. The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog agency, signaled that it would look into what role, if any, members of Congress may have played in inciting the mob of Trump supporters who breached metal barricades and shattered windows on Jan. 6, seeking to overturn the results of the election.

Banned last week from Twitter, Mr. Trump issued a brief statement on Wednesday, calling on Americans “to ease tensions and calm tempers.” But high-ranking officials, including some at the Pentagon, have maintained that they are profoundly worried about Inauguration Day, when President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is scheduled to be sworn in.

Seeking to keep their local counterparts informed, Christopher A. Wray, the director of the F.B.I., and Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a senior official at the Homeland Security Department, briefed more than 5,000 law enforcement officials on Wednesday about potential threats across the country. They stressed in particular that violence could erupt this weekend at all 50 state capitol buildings around the country.

For the first time since the riot in Washington, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the acting attorney general, issued a public statement, saying in a video released overnight Tuesday that he would not tolerate violence or other any criminal behavior and that Mr. Biden would, like all of his predecessors, take office on Jan. 20 in a peaceful transition ceremony. Mr. Rosen also vowed to hold those who stormed the Capitol accountable for what he called an “intolerable, shocking and tragic episode,” and asked the public to share with the F.B.I. whatever it knows about the assault.

The federal investigation — an inquiry of widening scope that has already ensnared more than 70 people — continued apace on Wednesday as charges of disorderly conduct and entering a restricted space were filed against Officer Jacob Fracker and Sgt. Thomas Robertson, two members of the Rocky Mount Police Department in Virginia who attended the riot while off-duty.

According to a criminal complaint, the two men broke into the Capitol last week and posed for a photograph underneath a statue of John Stark, a Revolutionary War general, posting it on a social media. The complaint mentioned a subsequent post by Sergeant Robertson who wrote that the photo showed “2 men willing to actually put skin in the game and stand up for their rights.”

The Houston police chief, Art Acevedo, said in an interview on Wednesday that one of his officers, an 18-year veteran of the force, was also under investigation in connection to the Capitol attack and was likely to face charges.

Capitol Riot Fallout

Updated

Jan. 13, 2021, 9:36 p.m. ET

“It absolutely is clear that he penetrated the Capitol,” Chief Acevedo said, “and we fully anticipate him being charged federally.”

Federal agents made more arrests on Wednesday in New York, Maryland, Texas and Florida, among them a firefighter from the town of Sanford, near Orlando. The firefighter, Andrew Williams, was charged with unlawful entry and disorderly conduct, and his lawyer, Vincent Citro, told a Florida news channel that Mr. Trump was to blame.

“The president and the Capitol Police encouraged despicable behavior,” Mr. Citro said. “Mr. Williams took part in none of it.”

New charges were filed as well against one of the most widely seen figures from the riot: a bearded man photographed inside the Capitol in a sweatshirt emblazoned with the logo “Camp Auschwitz.”

The man, Robert K. Packer, 56, was taken into custody in Newport News, Va., and was charged with unlawful entry and the disruption of official government business. In a complaint filed in Federal District Court in Washington, prosecutors said that a witness identified Mr. Packer because he wore the anti-Semitic sweatshirt regularly as he went about his errands in Newport News.

As more people are charged in connection with the attack, it has become clear that many of those who went to Washington last week were not only angry but heavily armed and, in some cases, dangerous. That point was driven home by court papers filed on Wednesday in the case of Cleveland G. Meredith Jr., who wrote in a text message that he wanted to put a bullet in the “noggin” of Speaker Nancy Pelosi on “live TV,” prosecutors said.

According to the papers, Mr. Meredith drove across the country with a Tavor X95 assault rifle, a 9 mm pistol painted to resemble an American flag and about 2,500 rounds of ammunition, including at least 320 armor-piercing 5.56 caliber rounds. Prosecutors say Mr. Meredith, who has a history of drug abuse and mental illness, also threatened to kill Mayor Muriel E. Bowser of Washington.

“I may wander over to the Mayor’s office and put a 5.56 in her skull,” he wrote in a text message, the court papers said.

This mood of outrage found an echo in the tumultuous congressional debate on impeachment, which stretched throughout the day. The sense of recrimination went beyond the boundaries of Washington as local politicians in other states lobbed accusations at each other.

A group of Arizona state lawmakers released a letter on Wednesday that they had sent a day earlier to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Wray, calling for an investigation into two of their own colleagues, Mark Finchem and Anthony Kern, who, according to social media posts, were at the riot at the Capitol.

The lawmakers also mentioned that two congressmen from Arizona, Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs, both Republicans, had planned the rally that preceded the riot with the organizer of the so-called Stop the Steal movement, Ali Alexander. A spokesman for Mr. Biggs has denied that he had any role in organizing the rally. Mr. Gosar appeared to be on friendly terms with Mr. Alexander, frequently tagging him in Twitter posts. At a rally last month outside the Arizona State Capitol at which Mr. Gosar spoke, Mr. Alexander called the congressman “the spirit animal of this movement.”

“It is vital to any current or future federal investigations, and ultimately to the Arizona public they represent, that we learn what these elected officials knew about this planned insurrection and when they knew it,” the letter from the lawmakers said.

A similar desire for answers — and for justice — was voiced by Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat and Army veteran who led the call for the investigation into whether any of his colleagues in the House played a role in instigating the Capitol assault. At least five people died during the attack and accompanying protests.

“To the extent there were members of the House that were complicit, and I believe there were, we will pursue appropriate remedies including expulsion and a prohibition from holding elective office for the rest of their lives,” Mr. Crow said in an interview. “They will, of course, be subject to criminal investigation and prosecution if that’s what the facts of the investigation show.”

Adam Goldman and Manny Fernandez contributed reporting.

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epacer · 4 years

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Crawford Neighborhoods to City Wide Neighborhoods

Fire Safety Gaps Exposed As San Diego’s Homeless Make Canyons Their Home

Look at the fire hazard map for San Diego, and it’s nearly all red zones.

San Diego’s landscape is dotted with hillside developments — old and new — that border scenic canyons and nature parks. The red on the map includes those brush-filled areas and signifies a very high fire danger.

The city fire department estimates the risk is highest for about 40,000 homes and vacant lots that sit along those canyon rims and slopes, from Cabrillo Canyon in Balboa Park to Tecolote Canyon in Clairemont to North Chollas Canyon in Oak Park.

Brush and overgrown vegetation have long created fire risks in San Diego and at all times of the year, but the situation has been exacerbated as the city grapples with a large, unsheltered homeless population, some of whom use the canyons as their home.

Fire incident call records obtained by inewsource prove the point: For the first nine months of this year, 11% of those calls mentioned homeless encampments.

Other public records and interviews with residents show frustration and at times anger with city officials over what’s seen as serious fire hazards caused by homeless living in the brush-filled canyons.

“It's their responsibility to protect and clear our community,” said Karen Lockshaw, who lives in Clairemont, four blocks from the Tecolote Canyon Natural Park.

Lockshaw called the city’s approach to managing brush and overgrowth an abuse of authority that puts parts of San Diego in danger of wildfires.

“It’s a matchbox,” she said. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Fire-related complaints filed on the city’s Get It Done app show she’s not alone.

“Illegal campsite with what appears to be some sort of campfire or cooking fire or something in Marston Canyon at the bottom of Vermont,” reads a report submitted in July.

“Possibility for fires, etc. exists with homeless camps. This is NOT a campground,” reads another, reporting concerns in Balboa Park in September. “This has been previously reported but the camp has grown larger.”

“I live on the corner of Mason and Jackson and hear yelling and fighting every day,” reads another from October 2018 about a homeless encampment in Presidio Park. “There is evidence beside these camps that they are building fires next to them. Please help remove theses camps as soon as possible.”

An attached photo shows a red baby stroller among the trees filled with personal belongings, and clothing hanging from a branch.

Tom Scott is a homeless veteran who said he’s lived in Balboa Park for about 15 years. He said he recognizes the conflict with residents and their fire fear.

“I understand that part and why they don't like us down there,” Scott said. But, he added, the fires are a necessity when you live outdoors.

“We use fire in the canyons to eat with and to keep warm with at night,” he said. “A lot of times they’ll cover up with a tarp when it gets cold and put on every stick of clothing they got just to stay warm with. And a little candle underneath the tarp. … But then you're taking the risk of burning the canyon down and yourself."

Nothing like that has happened this year, but small fires linked to the homeless have threatened San Diego neighborhoods — from a brush fire in October near Talmadge and Kensington to a canyon fire in July in Skyline to an April blaze that homeless people trying to keep warm started inside a section of the Cabrillo Bridge in Balboa Park.

Deputy Fire Chief Doug Perry, who oversees the city’s fire prevention efforts, said he understands the public’s concern about fire risks within city parks.

“They have a right to be worried,” he said. “The San Diego area, probably our greatest concerns even more than earthquakes are wildland fires.”

The city has made addressing homelessness a priority, he said, but added that the best solution would be to get people out of the canyon and park encampments and into some kind of housing.

“When they're cold, they're going to start fires,” Perry said. “Preventative-wise, we’ve got to find places for them to be housed and taken care of.”

inewsource asked for an interview with Mayor Kevin Faulconer and the head of his homeless efforts. His spokeswoman instead emailed a response to questions about fire risks associated with homeless people in the parks and canyons.

It said, in part: “If there is a potential fire risk, Mayor Faulconer has directed staff to remove that risk as quickly as possible. During peak fire season, public safety of all our residents is our number one priority and we are doing everything possible to mitigate the potential for spark.”

Get It Done app frustrates residents

Some residents who used the Get It Done app to report people living and setting up camps in canyons and parks found the system frustrating. They told inewsource their submissions were sometimes described as closed or corrected despite the problems not being fixed. Some residents experienced long delays in getting a response from the city, and others never heard back, according to an inewsource review of the complaint data.

Lauren Williams lives in Mission Hills and is the Presidio Hills block captain for her neighborhood town council. She said she walks the trails in Presidio Park every day with her dogs and regularly files reports to the city on fire dangers related to the homeless.

“I worry about it all the time, all year round,” Williams said.

Her fear now that it has gotten cold is that the homeless people in the park will be lighting more fires to stay warm. She’d like the city to increase lighting and adjust when police patrol so the homeless don’t know when officers will be in the park.

“If Presidio Park catches fire, my home and all of our neighbors’ homes are going to catch fire very quickly,” Williams said.

She estimates she’s submitted about 150 Get It Done requests in the past year and a half — not all are about fire dangers and the homeless — and about half were responded to or resolved. Williams said she’d like the city to be more responsive to the submissions but is glad there is an easy way to report problems. She said she’s seen improvements in the park since she started using it.

Residents who have complained about homeless encampments and other illegal activity in North Chollas Community Park aren’t as positive about the app.

encampments inside the park.

Four days later, they were listed as corrected without the problems being addressed, neighbors said.

Then, on the afternoon of Aug. 25, a fire broke out in a canyon near where the encampments were reported. Firefighters stopped the blaze from spreading an hour after it was reported.

The cause was ruled undetermined, but one resident said a firefighter showed him where the fire likely originated. It was a known spot for fires lit by the homeless in the park, he said. While no one was injured and no homes were damaged, the fire alarmed the community.

Residents wrote to Faulconer in September, citing “urgent requests” that included demands for more prompt responses to fire risk reports and illegal activity, clarification on which departments handle removing homeless encampments and improvements to the Get It Done app.

“We have used GET IT DONE frequently and have typically found it useless in addressing illegal activity in our park,” reads the letter signed by Oak Park Community Council President Richard Diaz on behalf of concerned residents.

Faulconer never responded personally to the letter, but his spokeswoman said the city has taken steps to address residents’ concerns. Among them: Police and workers from the Environmental Services Department cleaned up encampments, and an arborist assessed trees in the park.

Some neighbors said that’s not enough, and continue to call for safety improvements.

“We have gotten to a point that it's no longer just having a concern,” said Elida Chavez, who has lived in the neighborhood for 45 years. “But it's gotten to the point of being angry and standing up and having a voice.”

Bruce Thompson, another neighbor, said he continues to see evidence of problems and fire risks within the park. He described the current situation as a “bureaucratic bottleneck” that puts “people and property at risk.”

A recent park cleanup located “about eight lighters, eight empty marijuana containers, countless cigarette butts, many empty miniature cigar packages that people use to deal with marijuana so they don’t get cited for smoking marijuana in public,” Thompson said, plus materials used to smoke meth.

City officials acknowledge the Get It Done app needs fixes. It started as a pilot in 2016 and has had multiple updates and expansions. Another one is planned for early next year to streamline reporting of homeless encampments and directly route homeless problems to the Neighborhood Policing Division, which works with the Environmental Services Department to clear the camps.

City brush rules leave most of San Diego untouched

When it comes to fire prevention, the city’s own rules present challenges.

Fire officials said up to 100 feet of clearance is required in city parks with brush and vegetation that abuts homes. Depending on where the property line is, the city and homeowner share responsibility for maintaining the land.

The regulations do not require any brush clearance beyond 100 feet, including canyon beds where some homeless live.

North Chollas Community Park, for example, was in compliance with the city’s brush rules, a San Diego Fire-Rescue Department spokeswoman said.

The uneven topography where the fire originated prevented brush clearing, Tim Graham, a spokesman for the Parks and Recreation Department, said in an email. He said it wasn’t “feasible to cut brush in the area as we do not have equipment that would best be used in that area.”

The city assesses whether homes are properly protected and checks about 40,000 high-risk properties. Almost all of them are along canyons and hillsides.

“I want that brush cleaned up and I want it done now,” said Chavez, who lives near North Chollas Community Park.

Her major concern, she said, is “that people are going to get hurt, that children, families, are going to get hurt, and whoever's living in this area is going to get hurt, too. It’s about saving lives.”

This fiscal year the city budgeted for the Parks and Recreation Department to clear 509 acres. For context, San Diego has more than 40,000 acres of parkland within its boundaries.

Living among the city’s brush

Scott, the veteran who lives in Balboa Park above Florida Canyon, served in the Vietnam War. He’s 64 and said he’s been homeless for four decades. He said he was born at the Navy’s old hospital in Balboa Park, a short walk from where he now lives outdoors.

When asked how he would respond to residents worried about the homeless setting fires in the parks where they live, as he does, he said there are always two sides.

“Are they going to come feed us? They ain't going to come down in the canyon and feed us. They ain't going to come down there and keep us warm,” Scott said.

cott said he uses a camp stove to cook with – a safer option in his mind that allows for more control of the flames. Others put wax on wood to make fires for cooking, or use bark and paper bags for kindling, he said.

When Scott sees people creating fires within the canyon, he said he tells them to shut them down. Fires in the park’s mulch are very dangerous, he said, and will burn for a long time.

“Not all of us are bad people. Just because a couple of homeless go out and do stupid things doesn't mean all of us are that way, but they treat us all the same,” Scott said.

No one knows exactly how many homeless are living in the city’s brush-filled canyons and parks. When the annual point-in-time count is done on one night in January, volunteers are not sent into most of these areas. It’s dark and a safety concern, said Kat Durant, director of operations for the San Diego Regional Task Force on the Homeless, which oversees the count.

This year’s count identified 5,082 homeless people in the city, and more than half had no shelter. But Durant cautioned that the numbers are considered a count or minimum because officials know they don’t capture everyone.

Tiffanie Gibford said she’s lived in Balboa Park for about six years, and she’s seen the number of homeless increase.

“It’s gotten worse,” she said.

But for now, it’s home to Gibford. She said she feels safer there than in a shelter, and that homeless people have campfires there every night. *Reposted article from KPBS by Mary Plummer for inewsource of December 10, 2019

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jacewilliams1 · 4 years

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Arnold Palmer Talks Flying: A Baker’s Dozen with the Legendary Golfer

Whether you grew up watching legendary golfer Arnold Palmer win 92 professional victories or know of him more recently from the bottled namesake iced tea and lemonade beverage, what might surprise you is that he was also an accomplished aviator. From logging nearly 20,000 flight hours to setting a round-the-world speed record, Arnie loved flying. This interview is from a recorded discussion I was lucky enough to have with the King himself in 2002, where he shared some recollections as a pilot.

KB: What license or rating was the most challenging for you to get?

Arnold Palmer: The instrument rating certainly was some work, you have to put time into it. But the most difficult, the most tedious for a lot of reasons, was the Lear type rating. When I was getting that type rating, it was the number-one production airplane so there were no written rules, mostly just what the test pilots wrote up when they were getting it certified. Plus, I was the instructor’s first student, so we were both learning. He was also the FAA examiner. And that was long before a simulator, so we actually flew the airplane. It was fun, but it was a hard day’s work.

KB: Many celebrity pilots who fly their own aircraft, for example NASCAR drivers, often hire professionals to fly with them. Do you make your airplane selection based on if you can operate single pilot, or do you enjoy having a crew?

Arnold Palmer was one of the first athletes to fly himself to major events, in this case in his Lear 24.

Arnold Palmer: I’ve made selections based on what I could afford, and what I could get. In the early days, I flew myself. Then my schedule and business got so demanding that to take proper care of the airplane I needed another person to file flight plans and do everything. After a while, I got used to it. I’d go to the airport, climb in the seat, and we were ready to go. I became more dependent on having someone qualified, and it was the best thing to do. I had experienced flying myself to golf tournaments, and taking my two kids in the back and my wife upfront. But as life got more complicated, I really needed someone to get the airplane ready. I’d play four days of golf at a tournament, get to the airport, and we’re ready to go.

KB: Do you think there are any misconceptions about celebrity pilots?

Arnold Palmer: I never thought about it, but I suppose occasionally. The singer John Denver was a friend of mine, and I can’t imagine what he was doing—what happened—because he was a very capable pilot.

KB: How did you end up making a round-the-world flight in 1976, while setting a business jet speed record?

Arnold Palmer: I thought it would be damn exciting to take time off from all my work and fly around the world. We started in Denver, flying a Lear 36, and returned in 57 hours, beating the world business jet record by about ten hours. But I had another particular motivation to do the flight. Harry Combs was president of Learjet, and there were only two or three Lear 36s in existence at the time. The difference between the Lear 35 and the Lear 36 was they replaced the two back seats with an additional fuel tank to extend the fuel range. I had been flying a Lear 24 for nine years. My lease on it was running out, and I was looking for a new airplane. Combs said if I did this trip around the world, he would make me a very attractive deal on a Lear 35. That was my other incentive, and so, we did it! We used a Lear 36 that Combs leased back from a charter company, with new Garrett engines. I remember the Garret so well because there was a bearing in the aft part of the engine they were having some trouble with but quickly thereafter got it fixed.

KB: Did you depart heading east or west?

Arnold Palmer: For the first leg we took off from Denver to Boston, and then departed Boston to Paris on a very rainy evening in May. The weather report was that we would have nil to minor headwinds, but we were looking at something a little different. That didn’t deter us. We took off with an absolute full load of fuel and were cleared to 41,000 feet. The winds were right on our nose at 35 knots. At that point we had no radio communications, so we took it up on ourselves to go to 45,000 feet. Eventually at FL450 we picked up London Control on the radio and asked for FL450. They said we understand you’re already at 45 and that’s ok. From Paris it was a fairly normal flight to Iran, then down to Jakarta and out to Manila.

Palmer’s around-the-world flight set a record in a business jet.

In Manila the next part of the excitement started—we landed in a typhoon. And on the next leg, from Manila to Wake Island, we were taking off in a typhoon. No sleep at all. One of the first times in my flying career it was raining so hard I didn’t see the rain breaking off the wing. It scared me a bit that we weren’t going to get the lift to take off. Our weight was at gross, but we finally lifted off.

Our alternate airport, our contingency backup on the journey to Wake Island, was Guam. At the halfway point we found out we couldn’t get back to Manila because the typhoon was beating them up. So we finally got in touch with Guam, and they tell us they’re evacuating because of another storm system. That gets things a bit exciting. We had no choice, we were going to Wake Island, and it is just a tiny atoll with a big runway. We landed there eventually—got a little commendation from the Marine Corps and then took off for Hawaii.

KB: Flying over those long expanses of ocean, including portions of the route Amelia Earhart flew, did you ever think of the worst-case scenario?

Arnold Palmer: I thought of a lot of things, but never the Amelia disappearance. I had a navigator, and a copilot, both very good people. Sometimes I’d ask our guy in the right seat what the weather was like on the next stop and he’d say what’s the difference, we’re going anyway boss! And that was the case. It was our destination, and our destiny.

KB: On that record-breaking journey, what’s one memory that will always stand out?

Arnold Palmer: Flying off the coast of India to Ceylon, now called Sri Lanka, we were at 45,000 feet, with ice crystals building up. The omega, which at the time was a state of the art navigation system, was new enough that at that high altitude ice crystals would kick it off. The omega was inop until you reset it, but there was no place to reset. I was the only one awake on the plane and thought I was pretty macho—wasn’t going to wake the other guys up and get them panicked.

So, I had to decide how I was going to get to Ceylon as we had no VOR signal either. I started fiddling with the radar—it was a clear night—and I aimed the dish down. It picked up the coast of India, so I navigated right down the coast by using the radar, and then within 200 miles of landing I picked up the VOR signal. There was ground fog, it was patchy, and about 11 PM local time. The only beacons or runway lights or anything like that were 100-watt lightbulbs. That approach got my attention.

KB: Didn’t the Lear have a reputation for sometimes getting pilots into the aerodynamic regime called coffin corner?

Arnold Palmer: One of the reasons I had such a favorable deal to fly the Lear 24 was because publicity had not been good to it. But I truly loved flying that airplane. Without being critical of other airplanes, the Lear 24 was probably as nice a performing plane as I’d ever flown up until my Citation X. That coffin corner was so wide, you really had to do unconventional things to get into that zone. The tuck-under from going too fast is really what you’re taking about, and I think that came from conventional prop airplane pilots trying to fly a jet. Things happen, but that’s just my opinion.

Palmer flew a Citation X for many years at the end of his career.

KB: You’ve had a long-standing relationship with aircraft manufacturer Cessna, and very close friendship with its CEO Russ Meyer. How did you transition from Learjets to Cessna jets?

In the early 1960s, I was attorney Mark McCormack’s first client in what eventually became the global sports management company called IMG. He was my manager, so to speak. Russ Meyer, a former air force pilot, was also a young partner at the firm. He booked a lot of exhibitions for me, and helped grow my business. I got to know him very well and we became very close friends. He was an absolute aviation buff, knew the business very well.

I never leased or owned an airplane in all the planes I’ve ever had—and there’s a lot of them—where Russ Meyer did not handle the negotiations. A few years later he became president of Grumman American Aviation. In 1974, Russ went to Cessna and took it from a prop company to a jet company, with some objection. But he was right on. When I lost my Lear 24 contract, and Harry Combs never made good on his Lear 35 deal promise to me, I needed an airplane and went to Cessna. Everyone knew I flew Learjets, and I flew at .82 Mach. Heck, even the air traffic controllers would kid me. In the Cessna 500 Citation I’d be slower and they’d tease, “Hey, Arnie—we just saw a bird go past you on radar!”

But, there is not a finer airplane in the air than the one I fly now, the Citation X. Without equivocation, it’s the finest flying machine I’ve ever flown—the speed, the handling, the interior appointments, the cockpit, everything. And it’s comfortable. I can be sitting in this office and if my secretary says I’m due in California at 2PM, and it’s 9AM right now, I can just jump in the jet and I’m there in four hours.

KB: You and Winnie (Palmer’s wife, who passed away in 1999) were married for 45 years. Did she also enjoy flying?

Arnold Palmer: She absolutely loved it. She was a good flyer, and did start to fly early on, but with two children she wanted to raise, she didn’t have much time to spend on it. Sometimes I’d be flying, like one time in Birmingham when the weather was crappy, and I’d be busy. I’d say, “Win, when the man comes on and gives us the ATIS, copy it down in case I miss it.” Other flights, she’d crawl in the back and fall asleep. Very comfortable with me flying. She had other flights with other pilots, but was more comfortable if I was the pilot.

KB: Did you ever meet the first person to golf on the moon, America’s first man in space, astronaut Alan Shepard?

Arnold Palmer: I knew him very well.

KB: Did he use a seven iron?

Arnold Palmer: I thought it was a five iron.

(Note: Turns out it was the head of a Wilson six iron that Astronaut Shepard smuggled aboard Apollo 14, and then jury-rigged to a shaft of rock collecting equipment for a makeshift golf club)

KB: You’ve racked up decades of incident and accident-free flying. To what do you attribute that level of safety?

Arnold Palmer: Treating flying with great respect—never assume anything in an airplane. If you operate the way you’re supposed to, and fly the way you’re supposed to, you can really have fun. Give it the respect it’s due.

The post Arnold Palmer Talks Flying: A Baker’s Dozen with the Legendary Golfer appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/07/arnold-palmer-talks-flying-a-bakers-dozen-with-the-legendary-golfer/

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frontstreet1 · 5 years

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WASHINGTON — Democrats lined up in ever greater numbers Tuesday urging an impeachment probe of President Donald Trump, pushed to action by his phone call with Ukraine’s new leader and what Trump may or may not have said about corruption, frozen U.S. millions and Democratic rival Joe Biden.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was gathering her chamber’s majority caucus behind closed doors to consider next steps amid a political uprising that’s drawing deep support from frontline freshmen lawmakers and seasoned veterans.

Trump, meanwhile, insisted anew that he did nothing wrong in freezing funding for the Eastern European ally before talking with the Ukraine president about former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. That phone call is part of a complaint by a government whistleblower against Trump.

The president Trump acknowledged Tuesday that he personally ordered his staff to freeze nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine a few days before the phone call to Volodymyr Zelenskiy. In remarks to reporters at the United Nations, Trump said he held up the aid to fight corruption and urge European nations to share in helping out Ukraine.

“I’d withhold again,” Trump said. “And I’ll continue to withhold until such time as Europe and other nations contribute to Ukraine.” He named Germany and France as among the countries that should “put up money.”

The money, which had been approved by Congress, was released after the July phone call.

Pelosi, in Washington, said she would make an announcement about next steps “after I meet with my chairmen, my leadership and my caucus.”

A vote on some sort of statement of disapproval could come as soon as this week to show the House Democrats’ unease after the allegations against Trump. Another option would be to create a select committee to deepen the probes of the Trump administration. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler has declared that his committee is already conducting impeachment hearings, but the panel has been unable to get many key witnesses and documents from the Trump administration.

Pelosi is trying to hold off impeachment as a politically divisive issue unless the public demands it, but the new urgency could tip her toward launching a more specific investigation. Nearly 20 lawmakers have stepped forward in recent days, joining well over half the House Democrats now pushing toward impeachment.

“Now is the time to act,” said Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, the civil rights icon, in an emotional address to the House by the 70-year-old lawmaker who is often viewed as the conscience of the chamber’s Democrats.

“The time to begin impeachment proceedings against this president has come,” Lewis said. He said he has been patient but now, “To delay or to do otherwise would betray the foundation of our democracy.”

The Trump-Ukraine matter is part of the whistleblower complaint, raising questions of whether the president improperly used his office to pressure a foreign country to help his own reelection prospects. Democrats are demanding more information and those raising the prospect of impeaching the president now include many moderate House freshmen in competitive districts.

One idea that was being discussed was the possibility of a select committee that could handle these new issues.

Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA agent and one of the freshman Democrats from military and national security backgrounds who came out together for impeachment proceedings, said “the notion of a select committee is likely a good one” — as long as it remains bipartisan.

“We should all want to get to the bottom of these allegations and know without a shadow of a doubt that our president is either innocent or he’s not,” Spanberger said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The line of new lawmakers backing impeachment proceedings came as Spanberger and six other House freshmen from national security backgrounds — including a former Navy pilot, soldiers, officers and intelligence analysts — wrote in a joint op-ed that the allegations against Trump “are stunning, both in the national security threat they pose and the potential corruption they represent.”

If true, they represent an impeachable offense, the lawmakers said.

At issue is a summer phone call with Ukraine President Zelenskiy , in which Trump is said to have pushed for investigations into Biden and his son.

Trump has sought, without evidence, to implicate Biden and his son Hunter in the kind of corruption that has long plagued Ukraine. Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company at the same time his father was leading the Obama administration’s diplomatic dealings with Kyiv. Though the timing raised concerns among anti-corruption advocates, there has been no evidence of wrongdoing by either the former vice president or his son.

The United States began providing military aid to the government of Ukraine shortly after Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014. With Ukraine’s new president still grappling with separatist rebels in the east, the aid has long been viewed as a measure of Washington’s determination to push back against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Democrats, and some Republicans, have urged the White House to be open about Trump’s actions, including releasing a transcript of the phone call.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said he would seek a vote in the Republican-controlled Senate on a resolution calling for the Trump administration to provide Congress with the whistleblower’s government complaint.

Lawmakers are demanding details of the complaint, but the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, has refused to share that information, citing presidential privilege. He is set to testify Thursday before the House.

“Let’s see the transcript,” said Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, about Trump’s call with the Ukraine president.

Trump said Monday he may, or may not, release details or a transcript of the call but has stressed that foreign leaders should feel free to speak frankly with an American president without fear that the details of their conversations will later be disclosed.

By LISA MASCARO, MARY CLARE JALONICK and JONATHAN LEMIRE – Sept 24. 2019 – 1:59 PM ET

Associated Press writers Alan Fram, Matthew Daly, Michael Balsamo, Laurie Kellman and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report.

More Democrats Now Lining Up For Trump Impeachment Probe WASHINGTON — Democrats lined up in ever greater numbers Tuesday urging an impeachment probe of President Donald Trump, pushed to action by his phone call with Ukraine’s new leader and what Trump may or may not have said about corruption, frozen U.S.

#Corruption #Democratic Rival Joe Biden #Frozen U.S. Millions #House Speaker Nancy Pelosi #President Donald Trump #Trump Impeachment Probe

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biofunmy · 5 years

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Cathay Pacific, Icon of Hong Kong’s Rise, Now Reflects China’s Grip

HONG KONG — Two months of boiling antigovernment protests have divided Hong Kong’s people. Now, the unrest has pitted one of the territory’s best-known international brands against some of its own employees.

The Chinese government has forced Cathay Pacific Airways, a longtime emblem of Hong Kong’s proud status as a global capital, to bar staffers who support or participate in the territory’s protests from doing any work involving flights to mainland China. As part of the same demands, issued on Friday, it ordered that the airline begin submitting information about all crew members flying to — or above — the mainland to the Chinese authorities for prior approval.

Cathay said separately on Saturday that it had removed from flying duties a pilot who was charged with rioting in Hong Kong, and that it had fired two airport ground staff for misconduct. Earlier in the week, the airline said it would investigate accusations that its employees had leaked travel information for a Hong Kong police soccer team.

The orders from mainland air safety officials represent an escalation into Hong Kong’s business affairs, illustrating the power Beijing wields over international companies that build their fortunes on access to China. Some in the semiautonomous territory fear that China’s political encroachment also represents an economic threat, not only to Cathay, but also to all multinational companies in Hong Kong.

“If you’re a boss, you’re thinking, ‘Oh my God!’” said Carol Ng of the Hong Kong Cabin Crew Federation, a union that represents airline workers. “‘I just want to do business here. Now they’re screening my staff.’”

This kind of fear could do real damage to Hong Kong’s economy, Ms. Ng said, “much more than the protests or rallies themselves.”

Cathay representatives did not respond on Sunday when asked how exactly the company planned to enforce the new orders from Beijing. China’s aviation regulator was not available for comment.

The airline’s largest shareholder is Swire Pacific, a Hong Kong-based conglomerate with British roots. Its second largest owner is Air China, the state-run carrier. Cathay Pacific’s shares were trading about 4 percent lower early Monday in Hong Kong.

Cathay’s predicament underlines the economic pressures coming to bear on Hong Kong. Forecasters predict that the long-running protests on top of the trade war between the United States and China will weigh on the territory’s growth. Tourist visits have declined, and the Hong Kong stock market has been falling for the past several weeks.

Several Cathay employees interviewed by The New York Times over the weekend said that the company had not asked workers about their involvement in or attitudes toward the demonstrations, something that it would presumably need to do to stop them from working on flights to mainland China.

Still, the employees described an atmosphere of rising fear and anger in response to China’s demands, and of unease about how Cathay would carry them out.

“We are all so furious now,” said Sally Chu, a 28-year-old Cathay flight attendant. “We wonder how they can check on our activities and ban us, too.”

The airline, one of Asia’s largest international carriers, has already blamed Hong Kong’s recent turmoil for a drop in bookings. The controversy now threatens to test the company’s commitments to its employees against its own bottom line, which depends significantly on its ability to fly through mainland Chinese airspace.

The pilot whom Cathay removed from service, Liu Chung-yin, was released on bail after his arrest late last month. But the Chinese state news media noted that he had been allowed to continue flying, and warned that Cathay would “pay a painful price” for “tacitly encouraging antigovernment strikes.” Mr. Liu could not be reached for comment.

Other Cathay employees’ political activities attracted attention in mainland China after large numbers of the airline’s workers called in sick to take part in a recent general strike, which led to scores of flight cancellations.

Announcing the pilot’s suspension on Saturday, Cathay went out of its way to say that “we express no view whatsoever on the subject matter of any proceedings to which he may be subject.”

In a message to employees that day, Cathay’s chief executive, Rupert Hogg, said the airline planned to comply with the Chinese regulator’s new requirements. “Our primary focus must remain on delivering a safe, comfortable customer experience for everyone who chooses to fly with us,” Mr. Hogg wrote.

Just days earlier, the airline’s leaders had said employees’ political views were not their concern.

“We certainly wouldn’t dream of telling them what they have to think about something,” Cathay’s chairman, John Slosar, said at a news conference. “They’re all adults. They’re all service professionals. We respect them greatly.”

It is also unclear whether meeting the Chinese authorities’ demands will be enough to spare Cathay the wrath of Beijing’s propaganda machine. In a social media commentary on Sunday evening, the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, said that the airline’s actions had hardly resolved its “crisis.”

“Ground the flights that must be grounded, punish those who must be punished, rectify what must be rectified,” the commentary said. “In the face of such warnings, how can you joke around!”

Some Cathay workers said it might be for the best if they did not fly to the mainland after all, lest they risk being arrested or having their phones and other personal belongings searched.

“The airline must speak up and ensure the rights and personal safety of employees,” said another Cathay flight attendant, Karrie Chan, 24. “Otherwise I would feel unsafe even when at work.”

Cathay rose to pre-eminence by connecting Asia’s emerging economies to London, Los Angeles, New York and other centers of wealth in the developed world. Hong Kong prospered by connecting China to the global companies that wanted to do business there.

Today, though, more of those companies operate in mainland China directly, with less need for Hong Kong as a bridge.

And Cathay is now just one of many carriers linking East and West. China’s state-backed airlines can fly international passengers directly to and from the mainland’s megacities. The flag carriers of the Persian Gulf nations offer their own convenient routes to Asia for travelers from Europe and North America.

Cathay Pacific’s history is tied up with its home city’s emergence as a global hub in ways that date back to the company’s founding, in 1946.

The airline’s founders, Roy Farrell and Sydney de Kantzow, were pilots who had flown missions across the Himalayas to supply Nationalist forces in China during World War II.

After the war ended, Mr. Farrell, a Texan, bought a surplus transport plane with the dream of flying goods to China from Australia, according to “Beyond Lion Rock,” a history of Cathay by the journalist Gavin Young.

The Roy Farrell Export-Import Company’s inaugural voyage from Sydney carried “three and a half tons of clothes — for the tattered of China,” The Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Hong Kong at the time was in near ruin. Its harbor was cluttered with the wrecks of warships from the Japanese occupation, and air services were almost nonexistent. But as the British colony grew rich over the following decades, so did Cathay, transforming from a swashbuckling shoestring operation into a carrier of regional, then international, renown.

That the airline was British-controlled and flown largely by British and Australian pilots did not prevent it from becoming a source of pride for many people in Hong Kong — a respected global name associated with punctuality and good service.

The industry’s changing landscape began taking a toll on Cathay’s finances several years ago, and in 2017 the airline laid off hundreds of workers. It has since returned to profitability, although its image took another hit last year when it acknowledged that the personal data and travel histories of as many as 9.4 million people had been compromised in a computer breach.

Recently, Cathay bought Hong Kong Express, a low-cost airline, to help it better compete against budget upstarts in the region.

Cathay employees said over the weekend that they still trusted the company to treat its crew members fairly, and that concerns for their own jobs and safety were still outweighed by their desire to voice their convictions.

“The heavy-handed tactics of mainland China only make me feel that I must speak out so that they know how much we value freedom and democracy,” said Ms. Chu, the flight attendant. “Otherwise, they will only get worse.”

Raymond Zhong reported from Hong Kong, and Tiffany May from San Francisco.

Follow Raymond Zhong and Tiffany May on Twitter: @zhonggg and @nytmay.

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thewebofslime · 5 years

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Speculation continues to swirl in Haiti after a group of armed-to-the-teeth mercenaries, including five Americans, were arrested in the capital Port-au-Prince on Feb. 16, but then mysteriously allowed to fly back to the U.S. The men were found in a vehicle near the country’s central bank as Haiti erupted in rioting over government corruption. Much of the violence has focussed on billions missing from Haiti’s subsidized oil aid package from Venezuela, a fund known as Petrocaribe. The mercenaries’ unmarked vehicle contained pistols and automatic guns, satellite phones, telescopes, drones, bullet proof vests and fake number plates. When apprehended, they tried to deflect the police arresting them, saying “our boss will call your boss,” the Miami Herald reported. They were arrested anyway, but before they could face a Haitian court, the men were whisked away to Port-au-Prince’s main airport and sent home to the U.S., after Haiti’s Justice Ministry stepped in. The men are Christopher Michael Osman and Christopher Mark McKinley (both former Navy Seals); Kent Leland Kroeker (a former Marine); and fellow U.S. citizens Dustin Porte and Talon Ray Burton. Also caught were two Serbs, Danilo Bajagic and Vlade Jankvic. The only person who remained in Haiti was Michael Estera, a Haitian. Now the news site The Intercept, citing anonymous sources, says Kroeker, 52, had been told the mission was to escort presidential aide Fritz Jean-Louis to the Haitian central bank. Jean-Louis would then electronically transfer $80 million from the government’s Venezuela oil fund to a second account controlled solely by the president, Jovenel Moise, in order to give Moise greater power over the government’s limited funds. Moise has faced months of protests over his government’s failure to prosecute theft and mismanagement from the fund. A Haitian Senate investigation found that some $2 billion in Venezuelan aid had been stolen or misspent, largely under the administration of Moise’s predecessor and political patron, Michel Martelly. In this Feb. 12, 2019 file photo, an overturned car burns during a protest demanding the resignation of Haitian President Jovenel Moise in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. AP PHOTO/DIEU NALIO CHERY Moise had been at loggerheads with both his own prime minister, Jean-Henry Céant, as well as the president of the central bank, Jean Baden Dubois. The plan, the Intercept reported, was to put the $80 million beyond the reach of the latter two and into Moise’s sole control. The Intercept wrote that “regime-friendly” Haitians, directed by the owners of a civil engineering firm called Preble-Rish, ushered the men through the airport in Port-au-Prince at 5 a.m. on Feb. 16. The men skipped customs before staff at the airport had even arrived to work. The Intercept cited sources as saying that the mercenaries were told they would be “preserving democracy” in the crisis-hit nation. In return for helping Moise with the mercenaries’ work at the central bank, the outlet reported, Preble-Rish was due to be handed a lucrative state telecoms contract. Five heavily armed U.S. ‘mercenaries’ were arrested in Haiti. Why were they allowed to fly straight home? However security contractor Chris Osman told the Associated Press that the Intercept’s report did not match his experience in several key ways. He says that he and the group of fellow veterans were sent to Haiti on a mission to protect a businessman signing a more than $50 million contract at the bank. Osman, a 44-year-old retired Navy SEAL, said the mission was supposed to be a simple Sunday afternoon reconnaissance of the route their client would take to the bank the following day, Feb. 18. View of the offices of the “Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire,” the Police compound where Foreigners who were arrested on the previous night are detained in Port-au-Prince, on February 18, 2019. HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES “It went bad for us,” he said in the first on-the-record interview by any of the arrested men. “I don’t know what the real truth is.” Osman said he and his fellow contractors had pulled away from the bank when they were stopped by police and detained for three days before they were set free by the Justice Ministry and allowed to fly home to the U.S., where they were released without charges. Osman said he received a call from Hawkstorm Global, a security company based in Dallas, Texas, about a job in Haiti to provide private security for a client of the Bank of the Republic of Haiti for $1,000 a day. He said he didn’t know the client until he arrived in Haiti on a commercial flight on Feb. 16 and was introduced to Josue Leconte, a Haitian-American businessman with ties to the Moise administration. It went bad for us. I don’t know what the real truth is Leconte’s firm, Preble-Rish, has done millions of dollars of business with the Haitian government over the years, according to Jake Johnston, a research associate at the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research who recently published a three-week investigation into the contractors’ case. Leconte’s partner is related by marriage to former president Martelly. “These are not just acquaintances, but people who for decades are basically family,” Johnston said. The only Haitian arrested in the case, Estera, is a driver who has worked for Preble-Rish for many years, according to his lawyer. The contractors were told that they would be escorting Leconte from his Port-au-Prince home to the central bank to sign an infrastructure deal with Moise’s administration, Osman said, adding that the deal required the signature of at least one high-ranking central bank official, hence the location. “We were all told that it was a huge contract with (Leconte’s) company … and that his company provides engineering contracts for the government of Haiti and that they were really close friends with the president and that the money was for infrastructure and rebuilding Haiti,” Osman said. Leconte told the AP when reached by phone that he could not talk about the case and had no comment before hanging up. Meanwhile, spokesman Jean Baden Dubois said the governor of Haiti’s central bank was on a business trip in Qatar and unavailable for comment. A masked demonstrator gestures before burning tires on the fourth day of protests in Port-au-Prince, on February 10, 2019. HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES On the day they were arrested, the group of four Americans, two Serbian nationals and two Haitian drivers got into two cars owned by Jean-Louis for a reconnaissance mission and to swing by the bank so some team members could talk to people there and let them know what they were doing, he said. “The actual job didn’t even start until the next day,” Osman said, adding that he never met or saw Jean-Louis during his time in Haiti, and that the only time he heard the name was when police asked whether he knew Jean-Louis while he was in jail. They literally abandoned us He said team members Dustin Porte and Talon Ray Burton got out of the car to speak with bank officials or security while the rest of the group stayed inside with weapons nearby. Porte and Burton could not be reached for comment, and Burton’s brother did not return a message for comment. As they pulled away from the bank, Osman said a group of Haitian police officers stopped them and called their superiors. At that moment, Leconte and another man whom Osman identified as team leader and retired Navy SEAL Mike Phillips showed up in one car, and then Kroeker showed up in another car. Osman said police told Leconte and Phillips they could leave, and that Kroeker, a former KC-130 pilot, stayed with the group. “They literally abandoned us,” Osman said of Leconte and Phillips. Phillips declined to comment and referred requests for interviews to Kroeker, who did not respond to a request for comment. The group was released Feb. 20. Osman said a police officer simply opened the cell doors and led them to diplomatic vehicles that took them to the airport. He said he didn’t know who ordered their release or authorized it. Once they arrived in Miami, he said the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security interviewed everyone separately for several hours. “We asked what was going on,” Osman said. “They said, ’Nothing, man, you’re not going to be charged with anything. … Welcome home’.” Neither Moise’s administration nor the American ambassador in Haiti, Michele Sison, has offered any explanation of the U.S. contractors’ mission or the reason for their release, which appeared to violate Haitian criminal procedure. Moise’s allies in the lower house of Parliament dissolved the Haitian government by dismissing Prime Minister Ceant in recent days, just before he was due to testify in the Senate about the case. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio flew to Haiti for meetings with the president and opposition in which, the senator said on Twitter, he discussed the formation of a new government and the need for “good faith dialogue” and parliamentary elections scheduled for October. Meanwhile Haiti’s largest opposition groups have united in a campaign to push U.S.-backed Moise from office with nationwide protests aimed at paralyzing the country starting last Friday. Previous protests have led to dozens of deaths in clashes between protesters and police and left businesses shut for days, gravely damaging an economy already struggling with high inflation and worsening fuel shortages. Newly named Prime Minister Jean Michel Lapin said Wednesday that he encouraged peaceful protest but the government would not allow violence on the streets. “Our brothers are protesting for a better life, better education, health care and jobs. We encourage them to do that and respect the law,” Lapin told reporters. “People should respect the mandate of those who have been elected in a vote by the people.” We’d rather die standing up than our knees The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported last month that 26 people had been killed and 77 wounded in recent weeks. Haiti has moved closer to the U.S. since taking the Trump administration’s side in its push to unseat Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Haiti backed Venezuela in regional forums for years and received billions of dollars of subsidized oil from the socialist government. That aid has now disappeared with Venezuela’s economic collapse, and Haiti recognizes opposition leader Juan Guaido as head of state. A judge is investigating the oil money case and has frozen some local accounts but no other action has yet been taken against those presumed responsible. Along with the deteriorating economy and political instability, overall security in Haiti has been shaken by increasing gang violence and the Haitian police force’s inability to control large swathes of poor neighbourhoods around the capital. Opposition leaders Serge Jean Louis, Josue Merilien and Moise Jean Charles, who all head left-leaning groups, said they were calling their followers onto the streets until the president steps down. “We’d rather die standing up than our knees,” Jean Charles told reporters Wednesday.

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gyrlversion · 5 years

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The emerging Boeing 737 MAX scandal, explained

Boeing executives are offering a simple explanation for why the company’s best-selling plane in the world, the 737 MAX 8, crashed twice in the past several months, leaving Jakarta, Indonesia, in October and then Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in March. Executives claimed Wednesday, March 27, that the cause was a software problem — and that a new software upgrade fixes it.

But this open-and-shut version of events conflicts with what diligent reporters in the aviation press have uncovered in the weeks since Asia, Europe, Canada, and then the United States grounded the planes.

The story begins nine years ago when Boeing was faced with a major threat to its bottom line, spurring the airline to rush a series of kludges through the certification process — with an under-resourced Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) seemingly all too eager to help an American company threatened by a foreign competitor, rather than to ask tough questions about the project.

The specifics of what happened in the regulatory system are still emerging (and despite executives’ assurances we don’t even really know what happened on the flights yet). But the big picture is coming into view: A major employer faced a major financial threat, and short-term politics and greed won out over the integrity of the regulatory system. It’s a scandal.

The 737 versus 320 rivalry, explained

There are lots of different passenger airplanes on the market, but just two very similar narrow-body planes dominate domestic (or intra-European) travel. One is the European company Airbus’s 320 family, with models called A318, A319, A320, or A321 depending on how long the plane is. These four variants, by design, have identical flight decks so pilots can be trained to fly them interchangeably.

The 320 family competes with a group of planes that Boeing calls the 737 — there’s a 737-600, a 737-700, a 737-800, and a 737-900 — with higher numbers indicating larger planes. Some of them are also extended-range models that have an ER appended to the name and, as you would probably guess, they have longer ranges.

Importantly, even though there are many different flavors of 737, they are all in some sense the same plane, just as all the different 320 family planes are the same plane. Southwest Airlines, for example, simplifies its overall operations by exclusively flying different 737 variants.

Both the 737 and the 320 come in lots of different flavors, so airlines have plenty of options in terms of what kind of aircraft should fly exactly which route. But because there are only two players in this market, and because their offerings are so fundamentally similar, the competition for this slice of the plane market is both intense and weirdly limited. If one company were to gain a clear technical advantage over the other, it would be a minor catastrophe for the losing company.

And that’s what Boeing thought it was facing.

The A320neo was trouble for Boeing

Jet fuel is a major cost for airlines. With labor costs largely driven by collective bargaining agreements and regulations that require minimum ratios of flight attendants per passenger, fuel is the cost center airlines have the most capacity to do something about. Consequently, improving fuel efficiency has emerged as one of the major bases of competition between airline manufacturers.

If you roll back to 2010, it began to look like Boeing had a real problem in this regard.

Airbus was coming out with an updated version of the A320 family that it called the A320neo, with “neo” meaning “new engine option.” The new engines were going to be a more fuel-efficient design, with a larger diameter than previous A320 engines, that could nonetheless be mounted on what was basically the same airframe. This was a nontrivial engineering undertaking both in designing the new engines and in figuring out how to make them work with the old airframe, but even though it cost a bunch of money, it basically worked. And it raised the question of whether Boeing would respond.

Initial word was that it wouldn’t. As CBS Moneywatch’s Brett Snyder wrote back in December 2010, the basic problem was that you couldn’t slap the new generation of more efficient, larger-diameter engines onto the 737:

One of the issues for Boeing is that it takes more work to put new engines on the 737 than on the A320. The 737 is lower to the ground than the A320, and the new engines have a larger diameter. So while both manufacturers would have to do work, the Boeing guys would have more work to do to jack the airplane up. That will cost more while reducing commonality with the current fleet. As we know from last week, reduced commonality means higher costs for the airlines as well.

Under the circumstances, Boeing’s best option was to just take the hit for a few years and accept that it was going to have to start selling 737s at a discount price while it took the time to design a whole new airplane. That would, of course, be time-consuming and expensive, and during the interim they’d probably lose a bunch of narrow-body sales to Airbus.

The original version of the 737 first flew in 1967, and a decades-old decision about how much height to leave between the wing and the runway left them boxed-out of 21st century engine technology — and there was simply nothing to be done about it.

Unless there was.

Boeing decided to put the too-big engines on anyway

As late as February 2011, Boeing chair and CEO James McNerney was sticking to the plan to design a totally new aircraft.

“We’re not done evaluating this whole situation yet,” he said on an analyst call, “but our current bias is to move to a newer airplane, an all-new airplane, at the end of the decade, beginning of the next decade. It’s our judgment that our customers will wait for us.”

But then in August 2011, Boeing announced that it had lined up orders for 496 re-engined Boeing 737 aircraft from five different airlines.

It’s not entirely clear what happened, but, reading between the lines, it seems that in talking to its customers Boeing reached the conclusion that airlines would not wait for them. Some critical mass of carriers (American Airlines seems to have been particularly influential) was credible enough in its threat to switch to Airbus equipment that Boeing decided it needed to offer 737 buyers a Boeing solution sooner rather than later.

Committing to putting a new engine that didn’t fit on the plane was the corporate version of the Fyre Festival’s “let’s just do it and be legends, man” moment, and it not surprisingly wound up leading to a slew of engineering and regulatory problems.

New engines on an old plane

As the industry trade publication Leeham News and Analysis explained earlier in March, Boeing engineers had been working on the concept that became their 737 MAX even back when the company’s plan was still not to build it.

In a March 2011 interview with Aircraft Technology, Mike Bair, then the head of 737 product development, said that reengineeing was possible.

“There’s been fairly extensive engineering work on it,” he said. “We figured out a way to get a big enough engine under the wing.”

The problem is that an airplane is a big, complicated network of interconnected parts. To get the engine under the 737 wing, engineers had to mount the engine nacelle higher and more forward on the plane. But moving the engine nacelle (and a related change to the nose of the plane) changed the aerodynamics of the plane, such that the plane did not handle properly at a high angle of attack.* That, in turn, led to the creation of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). It fixed the angle-of-attack problem in most situations, but it created new problems in other situations when it made it difficult for pilots to directly control the plane without being overridden by the MCAS.

On Wednesday, Boeing rolled out a software patch that it says corrects the problem, and it hopes to persuade the FAA to agree.

But note that the underlying problem isn’t really software, it’s with the effort to use software to get around a whole host of other problems.

1of x: BEST analysis of what really is happening on the #Boeing737Max issue from my brother in law @davekammeyer, who’s a pilot, software engineer & deep thinker. Bottom line don’t blame software that’s the band aid for many other engineering and economic forces in effect.

— Trevor Sumner (@trevorsumner) March 16, 2019

Recall, after all, that the whole point of the 737 MAX project was to be able to say that the new plane was the same as the old plane. From an engineering perspective, the preferred solution was to actually build a new plane. But for business reasons, Boeing didn’t want a “new plane” that would require a lengthy certification process and extensive (and expensive) new pilot training for its customers. The demand was for a plane that was simultaneously new and not new.

But because the new engines wouldn’t fit under the old wings, the new plane wound up having different aerodynamic properties than the old plane. And because the aerodynamics were different, the flight control systems were also different. But treating the whole thing as a fundamentally different plane would have undermined the whole point. So the FAA and Boeing agreed to sort of fudge it.

The new planes are pretty different

As far as we can tell, the 737 MAX is a perfectly airworthy plane in the sense that error-free piloting allows it to be operated safely.

But pilots of planes that didn’t crash kept noticing the same basic pattern of behavior that is suspected to have been behind the two crashes, according to a Dallas Morning News review of voluntary aircraft incident reports to a NASA database.

The disclosures found by the News reference problems with an autopilot system, and they all occurred during the ascent after takeoff. Many mentioned the plane suddenly nosing down. While records show these flights occurred in October and November, the airlines the pilots were flying for is redacted from the database.

These pilots all safely disabled the MCAS and kept their planes in the air. But one of the pilots reported to the database that it was “unconscionable that a manufacturer, the FAA, and the airlines would have pilots flying an airplane without adequately training, or even providing available resources and sufficient documentation to understand the highly complex systems that differentiate this aircraft from prior models.”

The training piece is important because a key selling feature of the 737 MAX was the idea that since it wasn’t really a new plane, pilots didn’t really need to be retrained for the new equipment. As the New York Times reported, “For many new airplane models, pilots train for hours on giant, multimillion-dollar machines, on-the-ground versions of cockpits that mimic the flying experience and teach them new features” while the experienced 737 MAX pilots were allowed light refresher courses that you could do on an iPad.

That let Boeing get the planes into customers’ hands quickly and cheaply, but evidently at the cost of increasing the possibility of pilots not really knowing how to handle the planes, with dire consequences for everyone involved.

The FAA put a lot of faith in Boeing

In a blockbuster March 17 report for the Seattle Times, the newspaper’s aerospace reporter Dominic Gates details the extent to which the FAA delegated crucial evaluations of the 737’s safety to Boeing itself. The delegation, Gates explains, is in part a story of a years-long process during which the FAA “citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes.”

But there are indications of failures that were specific to the 737 MAX timeline. In particular, Gates reports that “as certification proceeded, managers prodded them to speed the process” and that “when time was too short for FAA technical staff to complete a review, sometimes managers either signed off on the documents themselves or delegated their review back to Boeing.”

Most of all, decisions about what could and could not be delegated were being made by managers concerned about the timeline, rather than by the agency’s technical experts.

It’s not entirely clear at this point why the FAA was so determined to get the 737 cleared quickly (there will be more investigations), but if you recall the political circumstances of this period in Barack Obama’s presidency, you can quickly get a general sense of the issue.

Boeing is not just a big company with a significant lobbying presence in Washington, it’s a major manufacturing company with a strong global export presence and a source of many good-paying union jobs. In short, it was exactly the kind of company that the powers that be were eager to promote — with the Obama White House, for example, proudly going to bat for the Export-Import Bank as a key way to sustain America’s aerospace industry.

A story about overweening regulators delaying an iconic American company’s product launch and costing us good jobs compared to the European competition would have looked very bad. And the fact that the whole purpose of the plane was to be more fuel-efficient only made getting it off the ground a bigger priority. But the incentives really were reasonably aligned, and Boeing has only caused problems for itself by cutting corners.

Boeing is now in a bad situation

One emblem of the whole situation is that as the 737 MAX engineering team piled kludge on top of kludge, one thing they came up with was a cockpit warning light that would alert the pilots if the plane’s two angle-of-attack sensors disagreed.

But then, as Jon Ostrower reported for the Air Current, Boeing’s team decided to make the warning light an optional add-on, like how car companies will upcharge you for a moon roof.

The light cost $80,000 extra per plane and neither Lion Air nor Ethiopian chose to buy it, perhaps figuring that Boeing would not sell a plane (nor would the FAA allow it to) that was not basically safe to fly. In the wake of the crashes, Boeing has decided to revisit this decision and make the light standard on all aircraft.

Now to be clear, Boeing has lost about $40 billion in stock market valuation since the crash, so it’s not like cheating out on the warning light turned out to have been a brilliant business decision or anything.

This, fundamentally, is one reason the FAA has become comfortable working so closely with Boeing on safety regulations: The nature of the airline industry is such that there’s no real money to be made selling airplanes that have a poor safety track record. One could even imagine sketching out a utopian libertarian argument to the effect that there’s no real need for a government role in certifying new airplanes at all, precisely because there’s no reason to think it’s profitable to make unsafe ones.

The real world, of course, is quite a bit different from that, and different individuals and institutions face particular pressures that can lead them to take actions that don’t collectively make sense. Looking back, Boeing probably wishes it had just stuck with the “build a new plane” plan and stuck it out for a few years of rough sales, rather than ending up in the current situation. Right now they are, in effect, trying to patch things up piecemeal — a software update here, a new warning light there, etc. — in hopes of persuading global regulatory agencies to let their planes fly again.

But even once that’s done, they face the task of convincing airlines to actually go buy their planes. An informative David Ljunggren article for Reuters reminds us that a somewhat comparable situation arose in 1965 when three then-new Boeing 727 jetliners crashed.

There wasn’t really anything unsound about the 727 planes, but many pilots didn’t fully understand how to operate the new flaps — arguably a parallel to the MCAS situation with the 737 MAX — which spurred some additional training and changes to the operation manual. Passengers avoided the planes for months, but eventually came back as there were no more crashes, and the 727 went on to fly safely for decades. Boeing hopes to have a similar happy ending to this saga, but so far they seem to be a long way from that point. And their immediate future likely involves more tough questions.

A political scandal on slow-burn

The 737 MAX was briefly a topic of political controversy in the United States as foreign regulators grounded the planes, but President Donald Trump — after speaking personally to Boeing’s CEO — declined to follow. Many members of Congress (from both parties) called on him to reconsider, which he rather quickly did, pushing the whole topic off Washington’s front burner.

But Trump is generally friendly to Boeing (he even has a Boeing executive serving as acting defense secretary, despite an ongoing ethics inquiry into charges that he unfairly favors his former employer) and Republicans are generally averse to harsh regulatory crackdowns. The most important decisions in the mix appear to have been made back during the Obama administration, so it’s also difficult for Democrats to go after this issue. Meanwhile, Washington has been embroiled in wrangling over special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and a new health care battlefield opened up as well.

That said, on March 27, FAA officials faced the Senate Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Aviation and Space at a hearing called by subcommittee Chair Ted Cruz (R-TX). Cruz says he expects to call a second hearing featuring Boeing executives, as well as pilots and other industry players. Cruz was a leader on the anti-Boeing side of the Export-Import Bank fight years ago, so perhaps is more comfortable than others in Congress to take this on.

When the political system does begin to engage on the issue, however, it’s unlikely to stop with just one congressional subcommittee. Billions of dollars are at stake for Boeing, the airlines who fly 737s, and the workers who build the planes. And since a central element of this story is the credibility of the FAA’s own process — both in the eyes of the American people and also in the eyes of foreign regulatory agencies — it almost certainly isn’t going to get sorted out without more involvement from the actual decision-makers in the US government.

* Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated that it was the landing gear, rather than the engine, that had been relocated.

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bisoroblog · 5 years

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How to Introduce Engineering Principles Early to Help Inspire Interest in STEM

This story about STEM education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

QUINCY, Wash. — A few years ago, a young female engineer named Isis Anchalee was featured on one of her company’s recruiting posters only to be subjected to a barrage of digital feedback questioning whether she was really an engineer. People posting on Facebook and Twitter said Anchalee was too attractive to be an actual software engineer and must be a model.

Anchalee responded like the techie she is. She wrote a blog post about her experience and added a photo of herself with the hashtag #ILookLikeAnEngineer. Twitter exploded with selfies of female engineers of all backgrounds and male engineers of color declaring they looked like engineers, too.

If she had known about the hashtag campaign and taken a look, Alessandra Gudino Aguilar, age 8, might have seen a grown-up version of herself. Alessandra, a student at Pioneer Elementary School in rural Quincy, Washington, spent part of the fall term in an enrichment class focused on teaching elementary-age students the principles of engineering design through a curriculum designed by educators and scientists at Boston’s Museum of Science.

“I like the process,” Alessandra said after a lesson in which she and her classmates used simple machines to move a bag of potatoes in an attempt to find the potato-moving option that required the fewest newtons, the unit of measurement for force.

Third-grader Alessandra Gudino Aguilar, 9, adjusts the simple machine, a lever, that she and her classmates are experimenting with during their STEAM enrichment class at Pioneer Elementary School in Quincy, Washington. (Lillian Mongeau/The Hechinger Report)

“Ask, imagine, plan, create, improve,” Alessandra recited when asked what her engineering class was about. “You get to use a lot of your creativity more.”

Alessandra is the youngest of three siblings. Her father works in construction and her mother, she said, works making French fries. A Latina student living in rural America, Alessandra is not the stereotypical future engineer. More than many professions, engineering is still dominated by white men. Forty-nine percent of the jobs in science and engineering were held by white men in 2015, according to the National Science Foundation’s report on “Women, Minorities and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering.”

Black and Hispanic women together claimed less than 4 percent of jobs in science and engineering, according to the report. Less than a third, 28 percent, of scientists and engineers working in those fields are women. Black and Hispanic men held less than 7 percent, total, of science and engineering jobs in 2015.

And while science and engineering degrees earned by Hispanic people have been increasing over the past decade, that same National Science Foundation report found that the number of science and engineering degrees earned by black people has actually declined.

High schools and colleges have been aware of the imbalance, and tried to remedy it, for years: There are many programs aimed at pulling women and students of color into science and math fields as teens and young adults. Some, like the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program, have been inordinately successful at guiding underrepresented students, including many young women, from middle school algebra through to a college degree in a STEM subject. Other efforts, like the Hour of Code challenge by Code.org, are more about exposing kids to the world of science and engineering than about shepherding individual students through years of education.

During their STEAM enrichment class at Pioneer Elementary School in Quincy, Washington, Emmett Bogle, 9, pulls a bag of potatoes up a ramp, while classmates Madilynn Mendoz-Felix, 8, and Mason Duran, 9, check the force reading and Hector Quintero-Ruesga, 9, records the result. (Lillian Mongeau/The Hechinger Report)

The Museum of Science’s Engineering is Elementary curriculum is aimed at attracting potential engineers before they get distracted by whether or not they fit the stereotype. Since 2003, more than 15 million 6- to 11- year-olds at thousands of schools across the country have been taught how to think like engineers using the curriculum.

Initial findings from the first study of how well the curriculum works show that students taught with Engineering is Elementary learn both science and engineering better than those taught the same subjects without the eight key elements included in the Museum’s curriculum. It turns out that explicitly teaching students about the connections between engineering, science and math, teaching the engineering design process rather than just posing an engineering challenge, and helping students gather information from failed attempts all make a difference to students’ ability to absorb and retain science and engineering concepts. Researchers also found that kids’ attitudes about girls in engineering were more positive for both boys and girls after being exposed to the Engineering is Elementary curriculum.

The Museum of Science, a nonprofit, makes an effort to ensure both children of color and girls have access to this hands-on curriculum and are represented in the stories used to kick off each unit. The curriculum is designed to fit into a teacher’s regular schedule. There are 20 units featuring engineering design projects that can be purchased independently and used alongside or in place of science units on the same topic, like electricity, water or insects. The teacher’s guide for one unit costs $55; an accompanying storybook is $9. Materials can be also purchased from the museum, but most materials needed to complete the experiments — like rope, pulleys and cardboard — can be borrowed from home or bought cheaply at grocery or hardware stores.

Teacher professional development options run the gamut from a one-day class for teachers new to the curriculum to a three-day session for teachers learning to train other teachers. Costs for whole-school training sessions range from $2,500 to $10,000 depending on location. Independent workshops at the museum can cost as little as $450.

Teachers whose students are mostly from low-income families are eligible for subsidized curriculum materials and professional development.

First-grade students at Pioneer Elementary School in Quincy, Washington, eager to try out the ramp their teacher is demonstrating during their STEAM enrichment class, raise their hands in hopes of getting a turn. (Lillian Mongeau/The Hechinger Report)

Camille Jones, a teacher at Pioneer Elementary School, discovered Engineering is Elementary in 2014 when she went online looking for ways to teach her students engineering concepts. Jones had just joined Pioneer as a STEAM enrichment teacher. (STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math.)

“I really loved what I saw,” Jones said of the stand-alone units. “I wanted a unit we could all do together [as a school]. I found a civil engineering unit on building bridges and thought that would be accessible to all.”

In one of her very first classes using the new-to-her curriculum, Jones said a struggling student blew her away with the model he built. She worked with his other teachers to pull him into the advanced STEAM class she taught despite his low grades in other subject areas.

“We talked so much about engineering and all the other fields and you could see him thinking, ‘Oh there is a future. I’m good at this and I want to live into that,’” said Jones, who was her state’s teacher of the year in 2017.

Engineering as a profession is expected to grow by 8.3 percent between 2016 and 2026 and to offer an average of 126,600 open jobs each year during that time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some engineering fields could grow even faster. The Bureau predicts we will need 10.6 percent more civil engineers and 15.2 percent more petroleum engineers. Engineering technicians, who need a solid background in math and science but not a bachelor’s degree in engineering, will also be in high demand with approximately 40,100 openings per year on average.

Perhaps even more relevant to students from low-income families: Engineering jobs tend to offer steady, upper-middle class employment. The annual mean wage for all engineers as of May 2017 was $96,670, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For children growing up in a school district like Quincy’s, where apple and pear trees are far more plentiful than bachelors’ degrees, exposure to engineering as a possible future job must happen at school, said Pioneer Principal Alesha Porter. “I just want our students to know it’s possible for them to become engineers and go to college,” Porter said.

Both Porter and Jones are from Quincy and attended high school together in the early 2000s. Porter was among the first in her family to attend college. Jones, who had grown up, she said, with “about as much privilege as anyone is going to have” in Quincy, got to college intending to major in engineering and found herself totally unprepared for the coursework. Both women aspire to better prepare their students to pursue engineering degrees, should they choose that path.

The Museum of Science in Boston isn’t the only provider of engineering curricula for elementary school students. The Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley, offers Amplify Science, which incorporates engineering principles of problem solving. Various other organizations like TryEngineering.org, PBS Kids and NASA offer engineering resources for K-12 classrooms.

There are also several single-city pilot programs offered by colleges. One, from Purdue University in Indiana, trains elementary school teachers to teach science using engineering design principles. American University and Johns Hopkins University work together on another to offer a program at nine high-poverty schools in Baltimore that both trains teachers and instructs students in real-life engineering projects.

“What we tried to do was pick topics that were very relevant to the student to make it appealing to kids of that age group in Baltimore,” said Carolyn Parker, the director of the masters of arts program in teaching at American University, who leads the project. “Kids at one school,” she said, “were really bothered by the number of feral cats. They wanted to help them. So how could you build cheap structures to provide shelter for cats in the winter time?”

Building those structures got the kids in Baltimore excited, Parker said, and that’s what she wants to see at the elementary school level, especially for girls and students of color. “I love science,” she said. “I love imparting that excitement and interest in the world to young people.”

The National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency, funds Parker’s work and several other organizations that work to get engineering classes into elementary schools. The Foundation also pays for studies, like the one being conducted on Engineering is Elementary, that examine how successful these new programs are at teaching kids about science and how to solve problems like an engineer. One of the goals of the National Science Foundation is to keep the United States “at the leading edge of discovery.” That includes preparing America’s schoolchildren to take on the massive task of leading in science in the 21st century, something we are arguably not making a priority.

Lesson materials from the Boston Museum of Science’s Engineering is Elementary curriculum cover the bulletin board in teacher Camille Jones’s Pioneer Elementary School classroom in Quincy, Washington. (Lillian Mongeau/The Hechinger Report)

American elementary school students currently get little exposure to math and science. Students in first through fourth grade spent an average of just 2.5 hours per week on science during the 2011-12 school year, the last for which data is available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Performance on measures of elementary students’ science proficiency reflect the minimum focus; just 38 percent of fourth-grade students performed at or above proficient on the 2015 National Assessment of Education Progress.

Numerous surveys have found that nearly half of elementary school teachers feel underprepared to teach science. Confidence in teaching engineering isn’t usually surveyed because engineering is not considered a standard elementary school subject. For that reason, teacher professional development is a critical part of the success of any engineering curriculum, said Christine Cunningham, founding director of Engineering is Elementary.

Cunningham said the elementary school teachers she’s worked with “really want those students to be able to understand the world around them and succeed. If [teachers] come in contact with a resource that engages a student who has struggled, they will bend over backwards to get those resources into their very full classrooms.”

Cunningham said teachers have guided her team’s curriculum development work from the beginning and that the curriculum has become so widely used because teachers have found it effective, especially with otherwise hard-to-reach kids.

Engineering lessons changed everything in her fifth-grade classroom in Lawrence, Massachusetts, said Nia Keith, now the director of professional development for the Museum of Science. Kids living in Lawrence, a mostly low-income community, weren’t often exposed to engineering concepts at home and many struggled to stay engaged with typical math and science lessons at school, Keith said.

But when she started teaching engineering, complete with hands-on projects and searches for creative solutions, “kids who didn’t speak up or show up as leaders were suddenly throwing out ideas,” she said. “It allows for all kinds of learning to shine.”

Back in Quincy, a ramp made of cardboard had collapsed and the top, stuck on with masking tape, kept coming off. Without missing a beat, Alessandra and a friend found some sturdier packing tape, fixed the ramp, and resumed collecting data on whether the short steep ramp or the long shallow one was a better way to move a bag of potatoes.

Alessandra said later she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do when she grew up but with her calm practicality and clear interest in the project, it isn’t hard to imagine her looking at herself in the mirror in 15 years and thinking: “Well, yes, I do look like an engineer.”

This story about STEM education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

How to Introduce Engineering Principles Early to Help Inspire Interest in STEM published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

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perfectzablog · 5 years

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How to Introduce Engineering Principles Early to Help Inspire Interest in STEM

This story about STEM education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

“Ask, imagine, plan, create, improve,” Alessandra recited when asked what her engineering class was about. “You get to use a lot of your creativity more.”

Teachers whose students are mostly from low-income families are eligible for subsidized curriculum materials and professional development.

This story about STEM education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

How to Introduce Engineering Principles Early to Help Inspire Interest in STEM published first on https://greatpricecourse.tumblr.com/

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therightnewsnetwork · 7 years

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Democrat Slams Neil Gorsuch: “He Believes the Intentional Taking of Human Life is Always Wrong”

During the hearing today in the Senate Judiciary Committee over Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, pro-abortion Democrat Dianne Feinstein slammed the potential High Court pick.

Feinstein drew on the issue of abortion for her criticism — saying that she probably will oppose Gorsuch because he believes “the intentional taking of a human life by private persons is always wrong.”

“President Trump repeatedly promised that his judicial nominees would be pro-life, and automatically overturn Roe v. Wade,” she said. “Judge Gorsuch has not had occasion to rule directly on a case involving Roe. However, his writings do raise questions. Specifically, he wrote that he believes there are no exceptions to the principle that ‘the intentional taking of a human life by private persons is always wrong.’ This language has been interpreted by both pro-life and pro-choice organizations to mean he would overturn Roe.”

“President Trump repeatedly promised to appoint someone in the mold of Justice Scalia and said that the nomination of Judge Gorsuch illustrates he’s a man of his word,” said Feinstein. “The Supreme Court has the final say on whether a woman will continue to have control over her own body or whether decisions about her healthcare will be determined by politicians and the government.”

Feinstein then described a 21-week abortion as the kind of abortion at stake if Gorsuch’s nomination is confirmed.

Brian Burch of CatholicVote responded to the attacks.

“Already, Democratic Senators are on the attack. They understand the historic nature of this nomination. Left-wing groups have used the courts and reckless judicial decisions to impose their agenda on the people. But that could all end soon,” he said. “Judge Gorsuch has pledged to obey the Constitution and to respect the limited role of judges. Judges are not policy makers. Judges are not politicians. And when the Supreme Court restrains itself, the Left typically loses.”

“Today, Senators presented their opening statements. Tomorrow, the real fireworks begin with 30-minute Q & A exchanges between Judge Gorsuch and individual Senators on the Judiciary Committee — for 10 hours not counting breaks,” he added.

SIGN THE PETITION! Vote to Confirm Supreme Court Nominee Neil Gorsuch

President Donald Trump nominated the federal appeals Court Judge with strong support from pro-life organizations that point to his track record as supporting religious freedom for pro-life organizations refusing to be forced to pay for abortions. They also noted his opposition to assisted suicide and his support for a state fighting to defund Planned Parenthood abortion business.

The Planned Parenthood abortion business was also quick toblast Judge Gorsuch as well.

The abortion giant slammed Gorsuch for supporting Hobby Lobby and the Little Sisters of the Poor in their bids to not be forced to pay for abortion-causing drugs in their employee health care plans.

“Gorsuch has also worked to undermine access to essential health care — ruling that bosses should be able to deny women birth control coverage. His record shows a disturbing willingness to let ideology overrule his constitutional duty to uphold and respect clearly established precedent protecting our fundamental liberties, including Roe v. Wade and Whole Woman’s Health,” Planned Parenthood said.

The 49-year-old Judge Gorsuch, if confirmed, would replace pro-life Justice Antonin Scalia – who supporting overturning Roe v. Wade and allowing states to once again provide legal protection for unborn children.

Justice Gorsuch is currently a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which includes the districts of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, as well as the Eastern, Northern and Western districts of Oklahoma. He has served as a federal judge since August 2006 and was appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed unanimously by the Senate.

The pro-life legal scholars who know him best say he is a strong originalist, believing that the Constitution should only be interpreted as the Founding Fathers intended. That would him squarely in the legal camp of Justice Scalia.

One of the biggest problems pro-life advocates have with the Supreme Court is that it invented a so-called right to abortion in Roe v. Wade. But Gorsuch’s writings indicate he opposes that kind of thinking. In a 2005 National Review article, Gorsuch wrote that liberals rely on the courts too much to made social policy.

This overweening addiction to the courtroom as the place to debate social policy is bad for the country and bad for the judiciary. In the legislative arena, especially when the country is closely divided, compromises tend to be the rule the day. But when judges rule this or that policy unconstitutional, there’s little room for compromise: One side must win, the other must lose. In constitutional litigation, too, experiments and pilot programs–real-world laboratories in which ideas can be assessed on the results they produce–are not possible. Ideas are tested only in the abstract world of legal briefs and lawyers arguments. As a society, we lose the benefit of the give-and-take of the political process and the flexibility of social experimentation that only the elected branches can provide.

He said liberal activists rely on the judicial system “as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education.”

On direct pro-life matters, Gorsuch sided with the state of Utah in its attempt to defund the Planned Parenthood abortion business.

Gorsuch sided with pro-life Utah Governor Gary Herbert’s effort to defund Planned Parenthood. After his decision, the 10th Circuit Court decided against re-hearing Planned Parenthood v. Gary Herbert, after the court previously ordered Utah to fund Planned Parenthood. Gorsch dissented in the case and wrote:

Respectfully, this case warrants rehearing. As it stands, the panel opinion leaves litigants in preliminary injunction disputes reason to worry that this court will sometimes deny deference to district court factual findings; relax the burden of proof by favoring attenuated causal claims our precedent disfavors; and invoke arguments for reversal untested by the parties, unsupported by the record, and inconsistent with principles of comity. Preliminary injunction disputes like this one recur regularly and ensuring certainty in the rules governing them, and demonstrating that we will apply those rules consistently to all matters that come before us, is of exceptional importance to the law, litigants, lower courts, and future panels alike. I respectfully dissent.

As National Review pro-life legal scholar Ed Whelan notes:

I’d like to take note of his remarkable failure to acknowledge, much less credit Gorsuch for, Gorsuch’s powerful dissent (see pp. 16-27 here) one month ago from the Tenth Circuit’s denial of rehearing en banc in Planned Parenthood Association of Utah v. Herbert. As the faithful reader will recall from these posts of mine, in the aftermath of the Center for Medical Progress’s release of videos depicting various Planned Parenthood affiliates’ ugly involvement in harvesting body parts, Utah governor Gary Herbert directed state agencies “to cease acting as an intermediary for pass-through federal funds” to Planned Parenthood’s Utah affiliate. But after the district court denied Planned Parenthood’s request for a preliminary injunction against Herbert’s directive, a divided panel, on very weak reasoning, ruled that Planned Parenthood was entitled to a preliminary injunction. Gorsuch’s dissent dismantles the panel majority’s reasoning.

Would a Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch be inclined to overturn the decades-old decision fostering abortion on demand? His record suggests he is open to doing so.

As one pro-life legal scholar notes:

In the panel ruling in Games-Perez, Gorsuch did indeed regard himself as bound to abide by controlling circuit precedent, just as nearly every circuit judge not named Stephen Reinhardt also does. But Gorsuch didn’t stop there. In a 20-page opinion, he urged the en banc Tenth Circuit to reconsider and overrule the wrong precedent.

Gorsuch also has made pro-life comments about abortion and strongly opposes assisted suicide. He has written a book, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, which (as Princeton University Press puts it) “builds a nuanced, novel, and powerful moral and legal argument against legalization [of assisted suicide and euthanasia], one based on a principle that, surprisingly, has largely been overlooked in the debate—the idea that human life is intrinsically valuable and that intentional killing is always wrong.”

Meanwhile, as National Review reports, “Gorsuch wrote a powerful dissent from the denial of rehearing en banc in a case involving funding of Planned Parenthood.” NR indicates Gorsuch has written “human life is fundamentally and inherently valuable, and that the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”

Democrats have already promised to filibuster any Supreme Court nominee.

Sen. Jeff Merkle, a pro-abortion Oregon Democrat, said in an interview on Monday morning that he will filibuster any pick other than pro-abortion Judge Merrick garland — who pro-abortion president Barack Obama named to replace pro-life Justice Antonin Scalia.

“This is a stolen seat. This is the first time a Senate majority has stolen a seat,” Merkley said in an interview. “We will use every lever in our power to stop this.”

Gorsuch is 49 years old. He and his wife, Louise, have two daughters and live in Boulder, Colorado.

from http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/democrat-slams-neil-gorsuch-he-believes-the-intentional-taking-of-human-life-is-always-wrong/

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patriotnewsblogger-blog · 7 years

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Democrat Slams Neil Gorsuch: “He Believes the Intentional Taking of Human Life is Always Wrong”

New Post has been published on http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/democrat-slams-neil-gorsuch-he-believes-the-intentional-taking-of-human-life-is-always-wrong/

Democrat Slams Neil Gorsuch: “He Believes the Intentional Taking of Human Life is Always Wrong”

During the hearing today in the Senate Judiciary Committee over Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, pro-abortion Democrat Dianne Feinstein slammed the potential High Court pick.

Feinstein then described a 21-week abortion as the kind of abortion at stake if Gorsuch’s nomination is confirmed.

Brian Burch of CatholicVote responded to the attacks.

SIGN THE PETITION! Vote to Confirm Supreme Court Nominee Neil Gorsuch

The Planned Parenthood abortion business was also quick toblast Judge Gorsuch as well.

The abortion giant slammed Gorsuch for supporting Hobby Lobby and the Little Sisters of the Poor in their bids to not be forced to pay for abortion-causing drugs in their employee health care plans.

On direct pro-life matters, Gorsuch sided with the state of Utah in its attempt to defund the Planned Parenthood abortion business.

As National Review pro-life legal scholar Ed Whelan notes:

Would a Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch be inclined to overturn the decades-old decision fostering abortion on demand? His record suggests he is open to doing so.

As one pro-life legal scholar notes:

Democrats have already promised to filibuster any Supreme Court nominee.

“This is a stolen seat. This is the first time a Senate majority has stolen a seat,” Merkley said in an interview. “We will use every lever in our power to stop this.”

Gorsuch is 49 years old. He and his wife, Louise, have two daughters and live in Boulder, Colorado.

http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/democrat-slams-neil-gorsuch-he-believes-the-intentional-taking-of-human-life-is-always-wrong/ %cats%

#abortion #conservative #life #right to life

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