Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Dr. Strangelove]

Lisa Page also testified that there were people at the top of the FBI who despised Hillary Clinton and made no secret of that fact. I imagine we shouldn't pay any attention to that however.

In the end, details of the investigations into Hillary leaked like crazy. Details of the investigations into Trump were kept quiet. Believe the nonsensical "we didn't leak Trump's investigation cuz we thought he wouldn't win" nonsense all you want

[Dr. Strangelove]

He's very worried he will be embarrassed by the Senate vote and is looking for any way he can to to bribe Senate Republicans to fall into line. McConnell will delay the vote as long as possible.

Trump believes genuine constitutional concerns are 'overthinking it'.

[Kapture1]

Lisa Page also testified that there were people at the top of the FBI who despised Hillary Clinton and made no secret of that fact. I imagine we shouldn't pay any attention to that however.

In the end, details of the investigations into Hillary leaked like crazy. Details of the investigations into Trump were kept quiet. Believe the nonsensical "we didn't leak Trump's investigation cuz we thought he wouldn't win" nonsense all you want

the investigation was the insurance policy against Trump winning. If he lost there would have never been a word of it.

And Clinton's crimes came to the public knowledge courtesy of a FOIA request. Federal statues do not require intent to violate the law re the mishandling of classified material, but I guess now we know the 0bama DOJ had it's thumbs on the scales of justice (it was known all along, but now it is known known)

Time for an investigation.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Trump's grounding all the 737's.

[Kapture1]

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[Jeff Buchanan]

Trump's grounding all the 737's.

Right .....from satellite tracking data, there are similarities in flight path deviations and pitch oscillations between the LionAir and Ethiopian Airline crashes. Points pretty directly to the Max 8s and 9s flight control systems.

The flight control systems in modern aircraft need some explanation. Sometime in the late 70s and early 80s, aircraft manufacturers started using "fly-by-wire" flight control systems. Previously, you moved the stick or the yoke and rods and bell-cranks moved the ailerons (controls roll), the elevators (controls pitch) and the rudder (controls yaw). I flew aircraft like this in the 70s. Even the last aircraft I flew up to mid 1990 had this sort of mostly manual flight control system. Manual type controls were augmented by a stability augmentation system that reduced yaw rates at slow speeds by automatically adjusting the rudder. It was quirky and sometimes on take-off and landing you'd see the nose wandering around aimlessly with auto-rudder inputs. You shut it off - easy. How did I know it was time to do this? I was looking out the windscreen and actually flying the aircraft using visual inputs to my brain from my eyes and how the aircraft felt. I wasn't glued to some sort of glass panel inside the cockpit giving me information about pitch, yaw or roll and going through a process to figure out what was wrong and correct the problem.

Aircraft with fully fly-by-wire flight controls run by computers getting data from control stick and throttle position, airspeed, angle of attack and all sorts of flight parameters are a relatively new thing (mid to late 80s). Max 8/9s have a joy stick like you'd find on a computer game console to fly them. There's no yoke or stick as in the old days and you don't feel any kind of resistance or feedback to your inputs on the joy stick like you might feel on the old sticks or yokes.

I've flown the F18 that has this kind of control system. The joy stick is to the pilot's left. I thought it was weird but the way the flight control computer works, it's impossible to stall, spin or otherwise lose control of the aircraft or pull too many Gs, breaking something in a hi-G maneuver, with the primary control system engaged. You can disengage it and do what ever you want without any limiting inputs from on-board computer aided flight control systems. Plenty of us shut it off for Air Combat Maneuvering. I also have a good friend who was a USMC test pilot when the Navy's F14 was introduced. It was a fly-by-wire, fully computer controlled aircraft and had a ton of weird stuff going on that tended to put the aircraft in weird situations. All of those were corrected before the F14 became operational.

Anyway, you should get my drift here ....... pilots glued to glass screens, not looking outside, not feeling the aircraft and controlling said aircraft instinctively have a good chance of mucking it up. Sure, I'll acknowledge Boeing, having known about this problem for a while now, has some roll to play here. Maybe it is a good idea out of abundance of caution to stop flying these aircraft until the fix is in and every pilot flying one of these aircraft knows what to do if the thing freaks out on them. But, I still have my doubts that this was entirely necessary. JMO, YMMV.

I can't speak to what role Boeing or the FAA may have already played - I'm pretty sure they have done quite a bit. I'm also pretty sure US airlines have included new simulator training to model this problem in the unlikely event that it will occur. We don't know how LionAir and Ethiopian Airlines addressed the known 737 Max 8/9s flight control issue with additional training but if I were a betting man, I'd bet the pilots involved in these crashes weren't trained well enough to quickly recognize the problem, shut the damn auto-pilot off and recover from a flight control computer induced nose down attitude.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Mike Lee breaks with the President...will vote against him tomorrow on the emergency declaration vote. 5th Republican to do so; would expect Mitt Romney to follow, most likely

[hack]

LionAir is a crappy third-world budget airline, but Ethiopian has its shit together. Serious airline. Very interesting how it comes from a country that's just absolutely disconnected and unique in this world, yet still its government has produced a world-class company in a sector where global standards are very exact, but that's what it's done.

[AlabamAlum]

I like saying Addis Ababa.

[hack]

No doubt that's pleasing.

[iam416]

Beto!

[Dr. Strangelove]

Somebody whacked the head of the Gambino crime family tonight

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-metro-staten-island-mob-boss-shooting-20190313-story.html

[Ghengis Jon]

Wonder what he did to get the other mob bosses to sign off the hit. Refuse to pay Trump protection money?

[Kapture1]

Wonder what he did to get the other mob bosses to sign off the hit. Refuse to pay Trump protection money?

he had evidence that would lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton

[Dr. Strangelove]

Both Houses vote to withdraw all US involvement in the Yemeni War. Trump will be forced to use a veto twice in a week.