Boeing 737 MAX 8 landing [image credit: Acefitt @ Wikipedia]

What is or isn’t genuinely ‘climate-friendly’ is a separate issue, but public perceptions are obviously important to competitive airlines and the plane makers they buy from.

We need to know if safety considerations at Boeing took a back seat to producing a climate-friendly plane, says Miranda Devine @ The New York Post (via The GWPF).

When Swedish eco-pessimist Greta Thunberg came to New York to shout, “How dare you!” last month, she maintained her climate purity by traveling on a carbon-neutral, solar-powered yacht.

Now that she’s in Canada, the teen doomsayer hasn’t explained how she’ll travel 4,000 miles home to Sweden without flying. She’s given up airplanes because she believes their greenhouse emissions drive cataclysmic climate change.

Air travel, which accounts for 2 percent of global emissions, has become the great bogeyman for climate alarmists, sparking a backlash against airlines.

Punitive eco-taxes, aviation regulations, activist investors, green NGOs and climate-aware passengers conspire to force airlines and manufacturers to lower CO2 emissions by using less fuel, which accounts for 99 percent of aviation’s carbon footprint.

No one has said it explicitly yet, but this relentless pressure to reduce emissions appears to have been a significant factor in the disastrous safety failures of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, which resulted in two fatal crashes in the past year, claiming 346 lives.

The warning from Boeing’s catastrophes is that climate ideology can have fatal consequences.

The 737 MAX was trumpeted as “Boeing’s game changer.” It reduced emissions by 14 percent and Boeing raced it into production to compete with a climate-friendly new offering from Airbus.

But in order to achieve its green goal, Boeing had to use much bigger engines that didn’t fit in the usual position under the wing of the repurposed, 53-year-old 737 design.

The engines had to be moved forward and hoisted higher. As a result, the aerodynamics changed, and the planes had a tendency to pitch up and potentially stall on takeoff.

Boeing’s solution to this hardware defect was an imperfect software bandage that would automatically correct the pitch.

In both crashes, preliminary investigations found this software kicked in even when the plane wasn’t stalling, with lethal consequences.

Continued here.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

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October 24, 2019 at 10:24AM