12 March 2019 — 1605 mdt

Bad news briefs (updated)

Rep. Ed Buttrey introduces his shrink expanded Medicaid bill. It’s House Bill 658, it’s 45 pages long, and at first glance, it seems to contain many or all of the hard-ass screw the poor provisions that were under consideration.

Democrats in MT Senate assist Tim Fox’s campaign for governor

How? They voted for HB-86, Fox’s “substance abuse” bill that imposes totally unnecessary limits on prescribing opioid painkillers. The death rates for drug overdoses, and opioid overdoses, in Montana are low and have been declining for years, but Montana’s legislators have been caught up in the national panic over opioids and are incapable of responsibly legislating on the issue. For helping pass HB-86, Democrats will feel political pain in 2020. The rest of us will feel bite-the-bullet pain.

Boeing in Max trouble after second 737 Max crash

Governments and airlines around the world are grounding Boeing’s 737 Max 8 and 9 models while they await an explanation for the crash of an Ethiopian 737 Max 8 after takeoff two days ago. The Federal Aviation Administration has not grounded the aircraft yet, but political pressure to do so is mounting. I’d give at least even odds that the FAA will ground the aircraft.

The crash has at least superficial similarities to the crash of Lion Air’s Max 8 in Indonesia last fall. We’ll know more fairly soon, as the black boxes have been recovered and are enroute to a laboratory that can extract their data.

Meanwhile, Boeing announced it’s readying an update of its flight control software to make “a safe aircraft even safer,” which strikes me as close to saying “there’s nothing wrong with our airplane, and we’ll get it fixed right away.” That does not inspire confidence in the company and its product.

Boeing designed the 737 Max to carry more passengers longer distances more efficiently that previous 737 models — and then designed the flight control system to emulate the flight controls of the 737 NG so that airlines could save on training pilots. In a way, that’s ingenious, but it’s also risky because according to many reports, the Max performs differently than the NG. The Max’s engines are bigger and slung farther forward, producing a greater pitch-up tendency than on the NG. Boeing compensated with a software fix, but did not fully disclose the nature of the fix to the pilots flying the Max. And the FAA blessed Boeing’s decision. The bean counters won a battle with the engineers, but as a result at least one of the Max 8s plowed into a beanfield.

According to aviation experts such as the Teal Group, Boeing has the engineering and financial resources to weather this storm. The storm will be expensive and there may be lasting damage to Boeing’s reputation for excellence.