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Nader's Message to Boeing: Ground the Planes Now

Nader's Message to Boeing: Ground the Planes Now

Eoin Higgins, staff writer

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader believes Boeing should ground its fleet of 737 Max 8 airplanes.

The message comes as the world struggles to understand what happened to Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which crashed Sunday, March 10, killing 157. The accident came just four months after the crash of Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610 in October—also a 737 Max 8.

We also have three near-misses when the pilot turned on the autopilot and then quickly shut the dangerous thing off.

This might be a good time to discuss other robotic problems:

An automated car couldn’t decide if that white thing was the sky ahead or the side of a tractor trailer. It decided to go with the “sky” thing. Good guess, but not this time. In another case an automated car assumed that if it saw a fire truck stopped in the middle of the freeway, the fire truck could not possibly exist because that’s not where a fire truck should be. The fire truck was behind a stalled car in the travel lane, so the automated car never even started to brake or swerve.

Now about those war drones…

A brand new NORAD system had just been turned on and was being shown off to dignitaries when it reported a big flock of Soviet missiles coming over the horizon. The dignitaries were hustled into a side room until the nuclear exchange was over, and so they pondered their deaths. It turned out to be the moon coming above the horizon.

More fun with automated warning systems: somebody put on the wrong tape in Hawaii, and lots of radio stations announced that nuclear missiles were now bearing down on Hawaii, as in, take cover and kiss yourself goodbye if you’re in the wrong place.

Maybe some genuine, honest civilian oversight with integrity of any system that can kill great numbers of people would be useful. Right now the U.S. is almost the only place on earth still flying the giant nosedive today.


Well what I always said about planes (a flying “bus”) and about a bus (think Greyhound), in a bus accident you usually only see a few injuries or maybe a couple of deaths in a really serious accident. In a plane disaster usually EVERYONE is dead and occaisionally a very few people survive. Hence, the fucking OBVIOUS procedures is to take extreme measures in a aircraft accident.

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This is what you get from AI, folks - whether it’s driving your car, your plane, your war, or your economy. It’s doing so well at killing people, we might as well let AI take care of the climate crisis.


Planes, just like many things today are run by software.
Is it possible for someone to remotely hack into a plane’s software ?

You’ll hear one answer to that kind of question from industry, which is usually hooey - as we now know from the security flaws of baby-monitors. For the truth of the matter, one need only ask “Is the device connected?” Offline devices cannot be remotely hacked, all others can.

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They must not have hit their break even profit lawsuit loss point

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On Ralph Nader’s latest episode of his radio show (after the main guest on climate crisis), he mentions an incident with a self driving car that switched off because the owner had missed a payment - the company did it or allowed it while it was being driven. I could laugh at idiots who buy these things, but it’s not funny having to share the road with them.

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Don’t forget that one of the Koch brothers was able to survive a fatal airliner crash.
So Capitalism wins again.
Let the flyer beware.

Both these tragic accidents happened outside the US they are flying 347 Max 8’s here no accidents?
The problem is these pilots outside the US are not getting the proper training on what do with auto trim system when it malfuctions due what is being speculated at this point is bad AOA sensor sending bad imput to the computer.US pilots get exstensive training on how to deal with trim problems and in this case my understand is that they can just shut that system off.

We are so fortunate to have that giant among giants in federal aviation as part of the Trump stable Elaine Chao. She will do the right thing I’m sure as soon ass he wakes up. There aren’t a lot of stupid people among the Asian community, but I think we may have found one. Money and lobbying perhaps? Dan Elwell? 'nough said. Thank god there hasn’t been another incident with death. Something is wrong with a passenger jet aircraft that goes into a full power on dive into the ground.

Lest we forget, Nicki Haley left the Trump administration for a seat on the board of Boeing. Also, investigation and meetings at the FAA on the Lion Air crash was put on hold for 6 weeks during the government shutdown. Would the people in the Ethiopian Air crash be alive had that not happened?


Amazingly, such a shocker; Trump grounded them last night; not that he cares about people, he just may have saved Boeing’s $$$ass.

Really that is so most unfortunate!!!