You're listening to the downbeat On ninety seven one the Free we will give away
tickets to see comedian Burt Kreischer tomorrow. All right, tomorrow. A couple
of text in about that, We'll give away tickets to see Burt Kreischer tomorrow.
That's happening. That's happening. A lot of people sitting against snake picks,
so dust spears. Snake Season is officially on board two and four eight
one seven seven eight seven one. Reacin always call and text in talkbacks too
on the red microphone button on the iHeartRadio app. Think this morning news coming
up in thirty Yeah, man, yeah, man, I got some low
level to mid stories that are going to blow your mind. So if you
can upstage the scuttle butt, dude, let's do this. J J.
Cobby, the Cobby your mind, dim my news control. You never know
what the tobe hold. Oh, we never know what's it? Koby with
that intro short enough that one. Yeah, I was respecting about Rodney Anderson
dot com. All right, So this uh is something we've been talking about
for a long time, and I've now it's gotten to the point where I
think we got so desensitized to plane stories that we weren't even doing our daily
plane story of something going down, whether it be a door plug falling out,
which obviously that was a huge story, whether it be a fight on
a plane. Crazy plane lady was obviously big letting up to it. But
about a month ago we had the Dallas Morning News aviation reporter Alexandra on in
fact, what's going on here? Are y'all just getting stories and making them?
So we're talking about planes more? Is this something? Is it all
made up? Yeah? Is it a trend? Is it a new hot
news thing that we all need to be talking about or hearing? Right?
Well, good mite. No, it's just something that's instantly relatable to all.
Nobody loves plane travel, but a lot of people do it a lot,
whether it be once a year, a couple times a year, or
every week. Very relatable. So it's just naturally something that you can picture
yourself in that situation and hope it doesn't happen to you. So, yes,
I think it's an easy story to do. And the news three passengers
on that last Airlines flight where the door plug blew out. They're suing the
airline for one billion dollars. Oh, they're suing the last Airlines and Boeing
for one billion dollars. Well, whether you like the show or not,
I don't care. But John Oliver did a twenty minute So what you're talking
about us? Oh no, it's not. At the TV show. John
Oliver did a twenty minute one billion dollars. Yeah, one billion. That's
a quick off firm half a mill and make it go away and they will
accept maybe billion passenger. You think the rest of the passenger like, hey,
I want it on this. You did it and you can do it.
I wondered that the wildfire story we did yesterday, we were like one
lady, right, it's like word for you, the only one that saw
the fire start. Someone else could have quotations. I'm glad you're doing this
because I watched the John Oliver just last night and that's a great show.
It's so well done. The depth of the dive that he will do into
a concerning topic and then make it funny and callbacks to stuff he referenced earlier.
It's just an artfully crafted piece of news. I think from the school
of John Stewart, right. Yeah, but they never deep dive on daily
show like that, let's too much, have the courage to do something for
like thirty straight minutes like a one piece. That was the audio support and
visual support and context and research and investigation, unearthing stuff that you never heard
and making it so concise and digestible. Really ambitions journalism if you will not
the amount of uh, fact checking and research and then and then probably legal
stuff too is probably a massive part of it, to make sure that they're
protected in the things that they are reporting aren't infringing on anything, or or
or untrue. Yes, it's it's intensive. It's all done in a week.
And sisters, one of the writers on that show, and that knucklehead
shows up, we're in pajamas us all she wins. Emmy's he unremarkable,
all the remarkability in that family in one direction. You talk about low level
to mid stories. Just wait till ten o'clock, mister mid, Mister,
mister mister Middle is at the mid table. For mister Mid. There's gonna
be a T shirt made in the midday, mister Mid. So, uh,
this is all going down. We talked about that the door plug blows
out the loose plugs was a story. Remember they or a loose bolts.
You know, we've seen all that like going on, but more than usual
at Boeing. This is their CEO, Dave Calhoun, taking some responsibility,
but also U like he's like, yeah, that boy was accountable for the
door plug blowing out, of course, but here's what he was asked,
like specifically, what happened when the door plug blew out? And you want
your CEO a CEO to have a better answer than this, how did an
unsafe airplane fly in the first place? Because a quality escape occurred? Can
you explain what is a quality escape? I think that's for description of what
people are finding in their inspections, anything that could potentially contribute to an accident.
What quality didn't the scape of the planetings? Boy, he sounded like
uh, he sounded like norm going through a live spot that he had no
copy for. He's got he got the name of the company, Quality escape.
What does that mean? It's it's it's when things can anything that can
go, it's anything anything that could happened. They had the meeting and you're
gonna get asked this question and they came up with the phrase or quality quality
escape. It was a quality escape don't worry. They won't ask a follow
up. Most that the lady, what does that mean? I don't know.
Head the shaky, which is very anything that potentially contribute to an accident,
Okay, anything now, like keep in mind, like a greater than
fifty chance. Most every time you're on an airplane, it is a Boeing
made plane. And that's wild because there's only two big time manufacturers, which
is nuts. So Bowe's investigation shows that get four bolts missing. And then
there were other Alaskan airlines Max Nines were confirmed to have loose bolts. So
the AA comes in, this is just this week and did this. The
Federal Aviation Administration gave Boeing ninety days now to come up with a plan to
address safety issues. This comes after a report released on Monday found employees did
not understand their role in safety and they feared retaliation for raising safety related concerns.
Those are big problems when you've got a factory that is making jets.
I loved how snarky he was. That's a big problem if you didn't know
jets. So they get ninety days and I'm sitting here going, Mike Eugine
gonna be on a plane like we're playing within ninety days, like they get
ninety days to fix this. I think it'd be thirty days would be good.
I'd assume you're ninety deep dive in this whole thing and all what you
do. This was shocking, this whole thing. But for the first time
in my I've never once known what type of plane I'm on. For the
first time in my life, I am after watching that and after hearing what
Kevin's about to present, I'm curious. I want to like check what planes
I'm getting on. Damn sure, Yeah, you damn sure? Do have
you ever not now? Not in a while. I haven't been on a
plane. God, what seems like forever. Really, Yeah, it's probably
been two and a half years. I jit want to know. I'm an
airbus man. I don't want to fly in a bowing Yeah, as stupid
as that is. And I'm sure just keep going, yeah, because it's
shocking. So Boeing used to have a pristine reputation. They built seven thirty
seven, they built the Air Force one. I'm sure they helped out in
the war, you know, of World War Two. I would imagine they
started in nineteen sixteen but here's what happened in nineteen ninety seven. A lot
of people think change things. Boeing and McDonnell Douglas today announced they were joined
together to form the world's largest aircraft manufacturer. This is, I believe,
an historic moment in aviation and aerospace. Yeah, the skyboys got business married.
Boeing merged with McDonald Douglas, who were primarily known for military planes and
had a lousy reputation for commercial airliners, most notably the DC ten, which
had multiple accidents resulting in over eleven hundred passenger fatalities. And look was merging
with the McDonald douglas Aerospace Manufacturing Corporation slash murder emporium. That Boeing CEO's worst
decision probably not because he also, and this is true, married his first
cousin. So the last decision I'd ask this guy to make is who it's
a good idea to couple up with? All right, So what's the bigger
story there that the Boeing CEO married his first cousin or that they merged with
a company that had a bad record basically in McDonald douglas. Oh, they
get DC tens were grounded like they discontinued the damn thing nineteen seventy nine.
Yeah, so that's wild and I know anything about that, and we're not
thinking about that stuff. But then it's also, well, there's the salacious
thing. I need to be even more invested and interested. The Bowing CEO
married his first cousin. How does that happen? I maybe we're all cousins.
I don't know, but how does that happen? You'd think you would
check that. So then they you know, they change a headquarters. They
moved from Seattle to Chicago. Well they're business offices, and yeah, their
business office, and they're way more focused on stock prices. Not necessarily,
it's about keeping shareholders happen, what's going on on the factory line, on
the floor. And there is a major campaign line. I'm sorry, this
is a mechanic. There was a major campaign launched called share Value, and
the idea was that they wanted everybody to be aware of the stock price and
they wanted everybody working together to increase the stock value. Even the technical meetings,
everything revolved around going stock prices. Okay, that's from a mechanic on
the plane. In technical meetings, they're talking about stock prices brutal. These
are the people building the planes that you are going to be on today.
Yeah, literally like half the planes, yeah, that are going place commercial
and commercially. And they move their business office to Chicago as far way as
they can get from Seattle, where their construction area is, and all they
care about is getting the number up. Yeah, and how do you not
abnormal? Then? How do you do that? How do you get those
stock prices numbers up? You make the company more profitable. And to do
those things, you you slash, cut corners, you work faster, Yes,
you work faster, You cut corners, You cut back on research and
development, you cut back on quality control, training, all that stuff.
But certainly this would not lead to planes full of passengers crashing, Kevin,
you wouldn't expect that to happen. Right this point, the CEO that married
his cousin, he is ousted because of a contract scandal. We're now moving
into the mid or mid two thousand tier. So the McDonald douglas CEO takes
over. But he ended up banging one of the vps, so there was
in a big affair there. So he gets ousted and they get another CEO.
They had three CEOs in three years. And this is all at the
time when they were rolling out the Dreamliner plane. Now, with the dream
Liner plane, they were very quickly trying to roll this thing out because basically
it got out of the starting gate a little bit late because the Airbus had
just made a new plane that was a little bigger and had a little more
fuel efficiency, and they're like, okay, we gotta make the Dreamliner.
We gotta catch up, we gotta catch up. So they start kind of
working faster, not necessarily safer. Also, they were having, you know,
some cutbacks and things like that, which aren't good. Well, all
they were doing was refitting an existing design yet it's already been in production.
It's kind of like putting a It's kind of like putting a hummer shell on
a Prius. You know, Oh, look at that new car. No,
bro, that's a Prius. That's the same car. So the early
Dreamliner they have a couple of fires on board two within a nine day span
due to a battery problem, and then FAA had to step in and ground
planes the Dreamliner for the first time the FAA had stepped in and grounded a
plane since nineteen seventy nine. With the DC ten by McDonald douglass and then
twenty fourteen, this is a video that leaked of a worker at a Dreamliner
plant asking employees if they felt safe flying on the plane. It just gonna
be a little harder to hear here because it's like a cell phone video,
But yeah, did you fly one? Do you want flying one? Did
you fly one of these planes? Did you fly the one you wouldn't blow?
Wouldn't you? Because I see did you fly one of these? Y
sketchy sketchy? Probably? But I'm so out of fifteen wealcas they lost ten
said they wouldn't fly on that plane. And honestly, that lost guy is
almost worse death wish dice. I kind of have a death wish. Yeah,
the guy I get the planet as a death wish. And out of
fifteen workers said they wouldn't even fly on the plane that they are making jeezu
shocking, and it feels like, look, it does feel almost a little
like fear mongerish. You know, think about this like, oh, I
know, I just want to get on the plane and get to where I'm
going. But the evidence and all of it put together makes you go,
oh, I don't like it. And this is the thing things we've been
talking about on the show for the last two three months with almost a daily
or at least two or three weekly stories. Yeah, I'm just crazy crap
happening on a plane. Some of those humans just acting up on planes.
But the door fell off of a plane. And let's not act like that
just doesn't happen because they were missing bolts that came from this factory. Yes,
that did happen. And if someone was sitting in that window seat,
yeah, they get sucked out. Most lies sucked off. Yeah out,
you said that wrong. It's sucked out, sucked off, the sucked off
out of the plane. Yeah, from the plane, sucked off the plane.
Children. I work with children. We're gonna allow it. This brings
us to the seventh part, being the mature voice of reasons. Yeah,
babies, I bet you there were revenue banana earlier. It was that was
the old I have changed. Gook tno banana, like said, he's get
right, oh, Gevin seven thirty seven Max. The next point here,
So the Airbus was its biggest competitor, or Boeing get caught off guard and
they announced the bigger one. I told you that and then Boeing makes this
conscious decision to work fast so I can compete. Here's a production line worker
who was worried about the corners being cut to make the seven thirty seven max.
What words would you use to describe that factory at that point? Dangerous,
unnecessary taking, unnecessary risk. He says. He urged the Boeing manager
to shut down the factory for a few weeks to straighten things out. And
what was his reaction to that? We can't shut down? And then I
kind of got mad and said, you know, I've seen military operations shut
down for a lot less. What was his reply to that? Something I'll
never forget. He said, well, the military is not a profit naked
organization. I will say the request to shut down the factory for a few
weeks did seem like a lot. It just seems like looking for some time
off. But we shut down the factory for a while to let's figure this
out. Yeah, I think it's fair, like if you're really worried about
it, and he was. I guess it's all easy to say about it
afterwards, because you find out that in twenty eighteen, a flight that was
bound for Indonesia crashed into the ocean, killing one hundred and ninety people.
The investigations determined it was due to a lot of short sighted decisions. One
of these, and this is where it gets a little technical, was because
of a software called m casts an m cast. Basically, I'm gonna let
this pilot kind of explain to you what mcast is, but basically, it's
an autocorrect feature that if the planes knows got up too high because of what
they had done to make the engines bigger. To modify the planes, they
added bigger engines, they had to move them forward and that causes the plane
often to tilt upward, upward, and if it tilts to too many degrees
up where the plane could stall. So to offset that, they put this
mcass on there to automatically push the nose of the plane down. Yeah,
so this m case automated software that would activate the tail fins at the back
end to keep to even out the plane. And this guy kind of explains
it a little bit better, but it's like it very important to this.
If a Happy Birthday mylar balloon gets stuck on that vein, it becomes unreliable,
I believe it or not. We hit balloons, we hit birds,
and all of these things are not uncommon. It's true the whole system could
be compromised by a balloon. At testament to how problematic it is to use
a single sensor and yet another reason to hate balloons. But it gets worse.
Because Boeing didn't tell pilots about mcasts, they decided to market the plane
two airlines as a money saver, and a massive selling point was that the
Max wouldn't require pilots to be retrained in a flight simulator. That that's a
pretty big expense for an airline, is it takes pilots out of the air
for multiple days. To save money by not telling you about this thing,
because we can't have you leaving your job to go to flight simulator training again
for a couple of days. So we saved money there, we just won't
tell you about it. And because it was also rushed and they didn't tell
them about it, the software didn't have a backup plan. It was a
it would do it on its own. This pilot, there was no way
to override it. They didn't even know that it was on. The plane
was outfitted with this particular apparatus and am I correct in saying that they're training
for these new planes was done in a two hour session on an iPad iPad.
The mom of the I didn't pull the idea of but the mom of
the pilot of one of the pilots of the Indonesian plane was like I was.
She was asking, what you don't have to go to a flight simulator
for these new planes? And he was like, no, I had two
hour iPad And she's like, iPad iPad, are you getting to it?
That that's what caused that flight to crash because them started pointing the plane downward.
Yeah, and the pilots didn't know what the hell this m cast was
and why this was happening. How backward is that? I mean, how
putting bicycle cards in your spokes is that that rather than configuring a brand new
fuselage that can accommodate this upgrade in size and engine, you have to create
an apparatus that counteracts the ill effects of that extra power on your plane and
not tell your pilots that it even exists. So when this thing enables itself
and goes wrong, they don't even know how to override it. They're like,
what, we can't do anything there's nothing we can do. I don't
see college class action lawsuits don't put these this particular airline one out of business
because there's so much negligence, so much negligence. Well, so they had
six weeks to fix the software, nothing got done. Four months later,
Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed into the ocean, same reason, because the mcast did
the same thing, killed everyone on board. Three days later, the FAA
comes in and grinted the seven thirty seven MAX. Now this is what came
out after the investigation. This is the last piece of audio I have,
but it kind of explains how this all happens and why there's nothing you can
really do about this. Hundreds of emails and instant messages show employees mocking the
FAA, the company, and problems with the airplane. One writing this airplane
is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys. That's pretty
much much of the oversight was being done by Boeing itself. For five decades,
manufacturers like Boeing were allowed to use what they call FAA designated inspectors.
Here's the problem. Those FA inspectors were employed by Boeing. It's the most
insistuous relationship we've seen in this story so far, which is something because this
guy was his first cousin. Amen, so Boeing owns the FAA's inspectors like
they own it. And his point at the end was, we don't need
Boeing to go away. We need Bowing to be good. We need them
to be better. Yeah, they used to be really good, man.
They need to be perfect. They need to be the standards are so much
higher. I get it that we all want to cut corners in life,
but when you are working for an airline and run an airline, the standards
have to be so elevated where any pretty much anything less than perfection is unacceptable.
Like this is happening in every business because that's just the world we live
in the world we live in sports. But if it happens at a restaurant,
you can stop going to the restaurant because water Burger have used to whatever.
Whatever you want to pick if there's cost cutting measures that you don't like,
but not with this. I mean, you're if you have to fly,
you got there's two options Airbus and and it did mention Kayak, the
website that aggregates prices and now they have a feature that you can click flights
plane types you want to go on and don't want to get. It's such
a popular feature that they had to move that filter option up on their website
to basically the first thing that you click when you're planning your travel is to
determine which brand you want filtered out of the search results. It's wild because,
like you can see this, a plane crash into the ocean, it
happens on international waters. We maybe don't think about it as much as we
should here. Okay, whether if it was an American flight that crashed off
the coast, you might think about it a little more. A door falling
off a plane like what happened here almost would garner more reaction than one hundred
and ninety people dying in Indonesia. And I think that's where I think now
that has really started to get into people's minds. But all this stuff,
though, it's all asked backwards, think about the profit will make and it's
just not the way you should look at things. You have to start things
and grow them, like it's just the way you can't work. Scary comes
down to stock prices. Well done, Kevin, incredible way way better than
the scuttle butt today. All right, I'm going to assume that that Steve's
sister wrote all of that, uh, and then that he had absolutely nothing
to do with it. Of course, not did you guys want to buy
a because they said they still having their gift shop online. The If it
ain't Boeing Boeing, I ain't going. I thought about getting one, and
don't want a coffee. That's pretty That's what the pilot used to say.
Right now, if it's not an air bus, it's pretty sus for us,
for us, That works, all right. You may not know the
name of the stand up comic Nick Swardson, but you if you don't,
you will after I play you audio of an absolute bomb that he had on
a night in a night club in Colorado.