Supersonic aircraft are just a terrible idea from a global warming perspective. It is not just the huge amounts of CO2 that they produce but also the amount of water vapor they release high in the atmosphere.

(Written on 10/10/2020)(Permalink)

We need federal regulation for industry's sake. It is incredibly expensive to have worry about and conform to different regs in different states. The differences add little value and a lot of cost. They are in effect an internal trade tax. Especially egregious are "professional" qualifications. To me it makes little sense that each state has its own licensing board for all sorts of jobs and people have to get certified / registered in each state where they want to operate or work. These rules mostly seem more of a way to either generate state revenue or to protect local fiefdoms rather than to protect consumers and do little to promote efficiency. It is even crazier that some of these "qualifications" are down at the county/ city level! A lot of these intra-state differences started way back when it took days of travel to get even a message from A to B and very little trade crossed state lines. Today the world is completely different but a lot of the old thinking still is in p

(Written on 21/09/2020)(Permalink)

Yep... as soon as Boeing moved the company headquarters from Seattle to Chicago it was predictable that the headquarters staff would become divorced from the engineers and that balance sheet issues would dominate. OK perhaps (but even that is doubtful) in a financial services company ...not so good in a company that builds aircraft. This is the sad fate of almost all large companies (for another example take much of the US car industry...it used to dominate the world...now not so much). Senior management gets isolated in some ivory tower somewhere away from where things actually get built and over time they forget what is, and what is not, important.

(Written on 21/09/2020)(Permalink)

Actually the House of Bacon on Main street DOES need regulation for more than health reasons . For example : to avoid customers getting caught in a fire trap with no fire exits etc.. They also need regulations that they are not serving under age patrons with liqour, drugs etc. The list is really quite long...... Most regulations, unlike what most "free market" people would have you believe, are necessary and have come out of hard learned lessons in the past. Are all regulations well written clearly the answer is no, however some of that is due to the difficulty of writing regulations that withstand legal challenge. I clearly remember in the 1960s car companies complaining about unnecessary government regulations about seat belts crash worthiness etc.... Now while we still have far too many traffic deaths the rate per mile driven has dropped very significantly, even as roads have gotten more crowded. The rate per million vehicle miles driven has dropped from 5/MMD in 1960 do

(Written on 21/09/2020)(Permalink)

Not enough REAL domestic competition. Far too many airports are dominated by a single carrier. Airline consolidation has been great for the bottom line not so good for customers nor workers and the localities they serve.

(Written on 20/03/2020)(Permalink)

You need to get to Econ 201. Do not mix up micro and macro economics.

(Written on 20/03/2020)(Permalink)

Not sure why this got down voted. On a normal tube aircraft one is rarely more than 6 ft off of the roll axis. With a blended wing one cold easily be 20ft off the axis. As for. windows on the last flight I was on flying north /south NYC to Caribbean most of the window shutters were down so people could watch their movies without sun glare.

(Written on 14/02/2020)(Permalink)

This event was predictable once Boeing moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago. What happens is that you end up with a small set of people interfacing with senior management and "corporate headquarters" thinking takes over and reality is slowly but surely left behind. The seeds were sown many years ago in 2001. Disasters like this are at the end of a chain of low probability events....in this case we had Boeing doing a poor job making some dubious design trade offs,plus a certification agency that was too accepting, plus Boeing minimizing the training requirement, plus the airlines going for the cheap option on aircraft specification and replacement parts , plus poor training by the airline, plus an inexperienced aircrew ...... Remove almost any one of those events and the crashes don't happen. All of the companies and organizations in that list own a part of the responsibility. However Boeing's actions started the chain and Boeing probably owns the bulk of the respon

(Written on 25/12/2019)(Permalink)

Yes lack of training .....training that Boeing said that was not necessary...."

(Written on 06/09/2019)(Permalink)

After Boeing has spent a fortune lobbying and funding politicians for that ability with the constant mantra of "small government" less regulations. Instead of blaming some amorphous "Government" we need to look in the mirror and understand that we get the government that big money pays for. What we see is a symptom of a bigger problem.....

(Written on 28/06/2019)(Permalink)