Boeing is America's flagship engineering company and they're both sucking bald eagles into the engine and going down. Quite literally in Boeing's case. The Boeing 737 MAX—previously known for its auto-kamikaze feature—is now becoming known for auto-gassing its passengers if it ingests a big enough bird (ie, a bald eagle, RIP). This has already happened twice and the authorities aren't doing anything about it because America.

Watch Mentour's magisterial video for the full story, but in March 2023, a 737-MAX flight sucked a vulture into the right engine. That busted the engine, and to prevent vibration, the Load Reduction System kicked in automatically. This 'fix', however, causes another problem. The LRD automatically dumps all the engine oil into the air conditioning, thus automatically gassing the passengers (who breathe from the right intake). The passenger cabin filled with smoke which was terrifying, sickening, but thankfully not fatal. The plane landed and a few people were treated for respiratory distress.

Then in December 2023, it happened again. Another 737-MAX sucked a bald eagle into the left engine. The LRD kicked in, dumped oil, but this time into the left intake, which feeds the much smaller pilots cabin. Analysis after the fact showed that they could have gotten a concentrated lethal dose in less than 40 seconds. The smoke also effectively blinded the pilots. As the report said, “The captain stated that visibility in the cockpit was restricted and that he could see nothing beyond the FO (First Officer), who was holding the Quick Reference Handbook. The captain also stated that his instrument panel was difficult to see and that he thought he might need to fly the airplane by solely using the heads-up guidance system.” Luckily the pilots got their gas masks on in time to not die and cut the left engine in time to clear the cabin enough to see, but this is obviously a big problem.

In both cases, the pilots didn't know what was going on because Boeing hadn't properly briefed them. And now, even after two baptisms by fire, Boeing isn't actually fixing the problem, because the fix is in. Boeing effectively certifies itself and the Federal Aviation Agency is a featherweight compared to the corporations that actually run America. So the FAA board disregarded their own Safety Board recommendations, which someone leaked to the press in disgust. Boeing the company is too big to fail, even if the aircraft keep failing.

Divide By Zero Fucks

How does this happen? Why won't it stop? My sweet summer child, nobody gives a fuck. Boeing is an apt representation of America in that both are trying to relive the 1960s without the manufacturing base or the luck. Both institutions are being private-equitied to death by people who are more than happy to make a killing while making a buck. The Boeing 737, for example, in a 1968 airframe that's been pushed into the modern era by pencil-pushers, not engineers. Like everything else in America culture, the 737-MAX is a reboot, and stale and failing to boot.

Remember that Boeing, like the country, long ago abandoned engineering for financial engineering. As their former CEO Henry Stonecipher said, “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm. It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money.” Today Boeing is no longer a great engineering firm and it's no longer making money, because the two things are connected. What the bean-counters missed is that you have to plant beans, you can't just count them.

The cannibalization and financialization of Boeing reflects the cannibalization and financialization of America in general. The same process plays out across many industries. America's military industry is still talking about F-16s, their film industry is still making Top Gun movies, and their civilian pilots are still flying 737s. The place hasn't had an original idea in decades. The entire empire is depreciating in front of us, while corporate raiders strip it for parts.

The Structural Problems

When the planes crash once Boeing says it's the pilot's fault, and only after they crash multiple times do the authorities ground them. But then they fix the symptoms but not the cause. The Boeing 737-MAX is merely a bad idea taken to its logical conclusion. The problem is not any one specific hack, it's that the whole thing is hacked together. The 737-MAX is held together by nothing but duct tape and depreciation tables. A plane that shouldn't be flying is flying itself into the ground because God forbid the stock market go down. Healthy planes don't do this. This is a plane in serious distress. The bean-counters tried to save money all around by not training pilots on a new airframe, which means that pilots didn't know about the auto-kamikaze and auto-gassing features until they killed/almost killed them. Which is a hell of a way to find out.

Nothing can actually be fixed here because the problem isn't the plane, it isn't even the company, it's the whole country. America doesn't nationalize companies, so the companies have privatized the government. Corporations run America and buy politicians like so many paid spokesman, while firing the working men and women that actually make America run. The already weak FAA, for example, is being culled by Elon Musk as we speak. For decades, Boeing has spent its earnings on stock buybacks (which used to be illegal, for good reason) and has been showing good engineers the door, even moving its headquarters thousands of miles away from the factory. This was all a fraud, but there was so much money in the fraud it corrupted the whole government. The US Congress is just an insider trading club and they're all in on it.

Boeing is today so dependent on government contracts and corruption that it's effectively government owned, but in ass-backwards American fashion, the corporations own the government. America is not even run by bad people anymore, it's run by ambivalent corporations. So under the new techno-feudalism Americans must depend on their corporate lords for healthcare, for food and shelter, and travel in whatever fire-traps they're given.

In late-stage White Empire, a bunch of accountants are just rent-seeking atop the corpse of what used to be an engineering company. Just as TV hosts and Twitter trolls are atop the government. Nobody can build anything, but they can make billions destroying. So planes fall out of the sky, steppes fall out of Ukraine, scales fall from the eyes, nobody gives a fuck. It's last call at the blood buffet and nobody's being polite anymore. Both Boeing and America are too big to fail, but failing they are. It's really one phenomenon with many different manifestations. Like a bald eagle getting sucked into a jet engine, leaving nothing but acrid smoke.

Boeing has been failing for a long time and I've written about it extensively.