I was wrong last week. The 737 MAX should have been promptly grounded on March 11th, 2019. Was history being written in the Ethiopian desert and off the coast of Indonesia? Sometimes history is written in just a few days. Are we witnessing the opening moves of America’s slide from #1 to #2 in commercial aviation? Why would the U.S. Justice Department launch an almost unprecedented criminal investigation of Boeing? The crashes of Lion Flight 610 and Ethiopian Flight 302 tragically killed 346 people. Could subsequent events prove even more costly? Were they really accidents or were they completely avoidable consequences of corrupt collaboration between corporate interests and government. Should it worry us that America’s new Secretary of Defense worked for Boeing for thirty years? Boeing’s stock price should tell us something profound. Like Europe’s Airbus, China is waiting to scoop up worldwide twin-engine single-aisle passenger aircraft business. What if America’s FAA has irreparably lost international prestige? Why did Boeing put two huge modern engines on a fifty year-old air frame? Why did they decide to omit information from instruction manuals about a computer system that can override the pilot? You wouldn’t buy a car that did that. Is Western defense and American security being held hostage by “The Swamp”? Also, I reveal my prediction about when the 737 MAX will again take to the skies and tell you why you will remember the first quarter of 2019 as history-making in American politics.

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