Boeing has recently experienced a repeated and escalated number of catastrophic quality events on its planes. From tires falling off the in midair, doors blowing off sky-high in flight, skidding off run ways, to the most extreme death which happened in Ethiopia in 2019 where all passengers were killed by a Boeing 737 Max while on its journey from Addis Ababa to Nairobi.
What is ironic thought in all this, Boeing has been reluctant at taking responsibility for its poor record and the accompanying American system for its corruption.
While the company was turned from an engineering behemoth to a sales profit driven beast, ran by clueless salesmen who know nothing about engineering, the United States members of Congress, were busy being corrupted with and by Boeing’s money to relax the United States FAA (Federal Aviation Authority)’s oversight on the company. These members should be investigated and arrested. Not only for the death of people on the Ethiopian and Lion Air Flights, but also for corrupting the American Laws.
This arrest should not stop there, but should be as well registered in the records of the ever-biased transparency international, which is not transparent after all when it comes to western corruption such as the 2015 Volkswagen (VW) emission scandal and the 2008 financial crisis which originating in New York and London, caused the loss of 35 million jobs and countless death due to suicide.
When it was first brought to Boeing that it’s product, the 737-Max were substandard and faulty at the occurrence of the 2019 Ethiopian crush, the usual default position as all western institutions was a racist, white Supremacist one, they claimed that the pilots in the Ethiopian Airlines’ aircraft did not know what to do, nor have enough experience and therefore that is why the plane crushed. It must be added that western media pointed out that they were third world pilots hence increasing the chances of these accidents, the racist western media claimed.
Investigations as revealed by a neocolonial mouthpiece, a PBS documentary evidence from the Blackbox expert analysis revealed that the Ethiopian Airlines pilots indeed followed all procedures as given by the manufacturer Boeing in their Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), it was rather the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) software installed on the planes by Boeing which malfunctioned causing the death of all not only on the Ethiopian Airlines 737-Max but 5 months earlier in another Lion Air 737-Max crash in Indonesia. Even in the Indonesian case where all people aboard died, Boeing adamantly insisted that it was because the pilots were third world and didn’t know what to do or how to handle new technology which is pathetic considering that all pilots take tests and do trainings on the new aircraft as laid out by the manufacturer in their standard operating procedures for all new products.
There still seems to be a persistent warped thinking withing the western psyche that to be a western white man is to know best, this is a lame psychology which was defeated decades ago and should never be relied on as a default position of analysis, but unfortunately all western institutions are operating from this default position. From the world bank and IMF who think that they know about the global south economies more than the people living there, to transparency international which white washes the massive unimaginable hi-tech corruption in western parliaments including insider trading, and now to the challenges Boeing is facing. Boeing, instead of investigating the problem internally, it would rather choose to default itself to this racist position. Boeing and the United States FAA should pay for their sins because COMAC is coming.
By Kwame Gonza, Technology follower, Railway engineering consultant, and PanAfricanist Member, ACUP-African Continental Unity Party.
