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'Fly something else': Former Boeing manager refuses to fly on the 787 Dreamliner
In a recent interview, a former Boeing quality manager cited numerous safety concerns in the 787 Dreamliner.

- John Barnett worked as a quality manager at Boeing for three decades, but recently left the company due, in part, to his concerns over issues in the production of the 787 Dreamliner.
- In a recent interview with Corporate Crime Reporter, Barnett said he would "change flights before I would fly a 787. I've told my family — please don't fly a 787."
- The allegations follow up two 737 crashes that occurred earlier in 2019, calling into question the airline company's dedication to safety standards.
The past few years have not been good for Boeing. First, in October of 2018, a 737 Max crashed just after take-off from Jakarta, killing 189 people. Then again, in March, another Max flight crashed after take-off in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, killing 157 people. Ensuing reviews revealed that the Boeing failed to adequately train its pilots on a new system responsible for the crash, refused to install safety systems that could have mitigated the crashes, and even pushed for laws that would cut back on oversight.
Now, a former quality manager for Boeing explained in a recent interview with Corporate Crime Reporter why these issues aren't limited to just the 737, and why he refuses to fly on Boeing's 787 Dreamliner.
Lowered safety standards
John Barnett had been a quality manager for Boeing for three decades, work which he enjoyed until he was transferred to Boeing's plant in Charleston, South Carolina, where the 787 is manufactured. Soon after his arrival in 2010, a new leadership team whose previous experience centered on Boeing's military projects began overseeing work on the commercial airliner at the plant.
"They started pressuring us to not document defects," said Barnett, "to work outside the procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected. They started bypassing procedures and not maintaining configurement control of airplanes, not maintaining control of non-conforming parts — they just wanted to get the planes pushed out the door and make the cash register ring."
At first, Barnett claims, these lapses started out as administrative issues, such as encouraging workers to improperly fill out paperwork. "Over time it got worse and worse," he said. They began to ignore defective parts installed on the planes and basic issues related to aircraft safety.
For example, one audit uncovered that approximately 25 percent of oxygen masks didn't work. Defective parts became lost in the system, only to be later discovered installed on flying aircraft. Barnett particularly recalls several defective bulkheads being installed without having been repaired.
Another major issue were the metal slivers. When securing the plane's floorboard with titanium fasteners, 3-inch-long slivers of razor-sharp metal would fall down into the compartment where the aircraft's sensitive electronic equipment lies.
"That surface below the floor board is where all of your flight control wires are, that's where all of your electronic equipment is," said Barnett. "It controls systems on the airplane, it controls the power of the airplane. All of your electronic equipment is down where all of these metal slivers are falling." Even at the Charleston plant, Barnett described how these slivers would cause electrical shorts and start fires. As the planes vibrate, these metal slivers eventually work their way into the wire bundles and connectors with the potential to cause these issues during flight.
I want the people to know what they are riding on.
Barnett filed complaints with multiple members of the Boeing team, which he asserts resulted in his reassignment to a stand-alone department that isolated him from other quality managers. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) did come in and do an audit, substantiating Barnett's claims. As a result of this, the FAA told Boeing that no more planes could be delivered that contained those metal slivers. However, Boeing had determined that the metal slivers were not a safety issue on the planes they had already delivered, and so the customers did not need to be informed. "And at the time," said Barnett, "I think we were up around 800 airplanes that had been delivered. Every 787 out there has these slivers out there."
Without seeing significant improvements, Barnett filed a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in January 2017. As of this writing, OSHA is still investigating and has not made any determinations.
Barnett stressed that he was a fan of Boeing's planes overall, asserting that the previous planes he worked on were built to be safe and airworthy. "But as far as the 787, I would change flights before I would fly a 787. I've told my family — please don't fly a 787. Fly something else. Try to get a different ticket. I want the people to know what they are riding on."
Lowering the regulatory bar
Wreckage from the March 2019 crash of a 737 Max airliner outside of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Xinhua/ via Getty Images
These allegations add on to previous criticisms that the airline company is putting profit ahead of safety as a means of staying ahead of its major competitor, Airbus. Together, they effectively form a duopoly in the airline industry, and staying ahead of its competitor in the already challenging industry has pushed Boeing to cut corners. Critics assert that the company intentionally skipped training pilots in new systems and procedures, a decision which may have led to the two 737 crashes earlier in 2019 and 2018.
Compounding these issues, the company has successfully lobbied for reduced oversight as well. The most recent manifestation of this was Boeing's lobbying efforts toward the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, a bill that the FAA claimed would "not be in the best interest of safety." A former FAA attorney claimed that "it set the FAA up for being totally deferential to the industry." Coupled with Barnett's claims that the company has been ignoring quality concerns in the 787 Dreamliner and the 737's recent crashes, this hamstrung regulatory environment does not inspire confidence.
‘Designer baby’ book trilogy explores the moral dilemmas humans may soon create
How would the ability to genetically customize children change society? Sci-fi author Eugene Clark explores the future on our horizon in Volume I of the "Genetic Pressure" series.
- A new sci-fi book series called "Genetic Pressure" explores the scientific and moral implications of a world with a burgeoning designer baby industry.
- It's currently illegal to implant genetically edited human embryos in most nations, but designer babies may someday become widespread.
- While gene-editing technology could help humans eliminate genetic diseases, some in the scientific community fear it may also usher in a new era of eugenics.
Tribalism and discrimination
<p>One question the "Genetic Pressure" series explores: What would tribalism and discrimination look like in a world with designer babies? As designer babies grow up, they could be noticeably different from other people, potentially being smarter, more attractive and healthier. This could breed resentment between the groups—as it does in the series.</p><p>"[Designer babies] slowly find that 'everyone else,' and even their own parents, becomes less and less tolerable," author Eugene Clark told Big Think. "Meanwhile, everyone else slowly feels threatened by the designer babies."</p><p>For example, one character in the series who was born a designer baby faces discrimination and harassment from "normal people"—they call her "soulless" and say she was "made in a factory," a "consumer product." </p><p>Would such divisions emerge in the real world? The answer may depend on who's able to afford designer baby services. If it's only the ultra-wealthy, then it's easy to imagine how being a designer baby could be seen by society as a kind of hyper-privilege, which designer babies would have to reckon with. </p><p>Even if people from all socioeconomic backgrounds can someday afford designer babies, people born designer babies may struggle with tough existential questions: Can they ever take full credit for things they achieve, or were they born with an unfair advantage? To what extent should they spend their lives helping the less fortunate? </p>Sexuality dilemmas
<p>Sexuality presents another set of thorny questions. If a designer baby industry someday allows people to optimize humans for attractiveness, designer babies could grow up to find themselves surrounded by ultra-attractive people. That may not sound like a big problem.</p><p>But consider that, if designer babies someday become the standard way to have children, there'd necessarily be a years-long gap in which only some people are having designer babies. Meanwhile, the rest of society would be having children the old-fashioned way. So, in terms of attractiveness, society could see increasingly apparent disparities in physical appearances between the two groups. "Normal people" could begin to seem increasingly ugly.</p><p>But ultra-attractive people who were born designer babies could face problems, too. One could be the loss of body image. </p><p>When designer babies grow up in the "Genetic Pressure" series, men look like all the other men, and women look like all the other women. This homogeneity of physical appearance occurs because parents of designer babies start following trends, all choosing similar traits for their children: tall, athletic build, olive skin, etc. </p><p>Sure, facial traits remain relatively unique, but everyone's more or less equally attractive. And this causes strange changes to sexual preferences.</p><p>"In a society of sexual equals, they start looking for other differentiators," he said, noting that violet-colored eyes become a rare trait that genetically engineered humans find especially attractive in the series.</p><p>But what about sexual relationships between genetically engineered humans and "normal" people? In the "Genetic Pressure" series, many "normal" people want to have kids with (or at least have sex with) genetically engineered humans. But a minority of engineered humans oppose breeding with "normal" people, and this leads to an ideology that considers engineered humans to be racially supreme. </p>Regulating designer babies
<p>On a policy level, there are many open questions about how governments might legislate a world with designer babies. But it's not totally new territory, considering the West's dark history of eugenics experiments.</p><p>In the 20th century, the U.S. conducted multiple eugenics programs, including immigration restrictions based on genetic inferiority and forced sterilizations. In 1927, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that forcibly sterilizing the mentally handicapped didn't violate the Constitution. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes wrote, "… three generations of imbeciles are enough." </p><p>After the Holocaust, eugenics programs became increasingly taboo and regulated in the U.S. (though some states continued forced sterilizations <a href="https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/" target="_blank">into the 1970s</a>). In recent years, some policymakers and scientists have expressed concerns about how gene-editing technologies could reanimate the eugenics nightmares of the 20th century. </p><p>Currently, the U.S. doesn't explicitly ban human germline genetic editing on the federal level, but a combination of laws effectively render it <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jlb/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jlb/lsaa006/5841599#204481018" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">illegal to implant a genetically modified embryo</a>. Part of the reason is that scientists still aren't sure of the unintended consequences of new gene-editing technologies. </p><p>But there are also concerns that these technologies could usher in a new era of eugenics. After all, the function of a designer baby industry, like the one in the "Genetic Pressure" series, wouldn't necessarily be limited to eliminating genetic diseases; it could also work to increase the occurrence of "desirable" traits. </p><p>If the industry did that, it'd effectively signal that the <em>opposites of those traits are undesirable. </em>As the International Bioethics Committee <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jlb/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jlb/lsaa006/5841599#204481018" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">wrote</a>, this would "jeopardize the inherent and therefore equal dignity of all human beings and renew eugenics, disguised as the fulfillment of the wish for a better, improved life."</p><p><em>"Genetic Pressure Volume I: Baby Steps"</em><em> by Eugene Clark is <a href="http://bigth.ink/38VhJn3" target="_blank">available now.</a></em></p>Octopus-like creatures inhabit Jupiter’s moon, claims space scientist
A leading British space scientist thinks there is life under the ice sheets of Europa.
Jupiter's moon Europa has a huge ocean beneath its sheets of ice.
- A British scientist named Professor Monica Grady recently came out in support of extraterrestrial life on Europa.
- Europa, the sixth largest moon in the solar system, may have favorable conditions for life under its miles of ice.
- The moon is one of Jupiter's 79.
Neil deGrasse Tyson wants to go ice fishing on Europa
<div class="rm-shortcode" data-media_id="GLGsRX7e" data-player_id="FvQKszTI" data-rm-shortcode-id="f4790eb8f0515e036b24c4195299df28"> <div id="botr_GLGsRX7e_FvQKszTI_div" class="jwplayer-media" data-jwplayer-video-src="https://content.jwplatform.com/players/GLGsRX7e-FvQKszTI.js"> <img src="https://cdn.jwplayer.com/thumbs/GLGsRX7e-1920.jpg" class="jwplayer-media-preview" /> </div> <script src="https://content.jwplatform.com/players/GLGsRX7e-FvQKszTI.js"></script> </div>Water Vapor Above Europa’s Surface Deteced for First Time
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9c4abc8473e1b89170cc8941beeb1f2d"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WQ-E1lnSOzc?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>Lair of giant predator worms from 20 million years ago found
Scientists discover burrows of giant predator worms that lived on the seafloor 20 million years ago.
Bobbit worm (Eunice aphroditois).
- Scientists in Taiwan find the lair of giant predator worms that inhabited the seafloor 20 million years ago.
- The worm is possibly related to the modern bobbit worm (Eunice aphroditois).
- The creatures can reach several meters in length and famously ambush their pray.
A three-dimensional model of the feeding behavior of Bobbit worms and the proposed formation of Pennichnus formosae.
Credit: Scientific Reports
Beware the Bobbit Worm!
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="1f9918e77851242c91382369581d3aac"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_As1pHhyDHY?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>What is the ‘self’? The 3 layers of your identity.
Answering the question of who you are is not an easy task. Let's unpack what culture, philosophy, and neuroscience have to say.
- Who am I? It's a question that humans have grappled with since the dawn of time, and most of us are no closer to an answer.
- Trying to pin down what makes you you depends on which school of thought you prescribe to. Some argue that the self is an illusion, while others believe that finding one's "true self" is about sincerity and authenticity.
- In this video, author Gish Jen, Harvard professor Michael Puett, psychotherapist Mark Epstein, and neuroscientist Sam Harris discuss three layers of the self, looking through the lens of culture, philosophy, and neuroscience.
Discovery of two giant radio galaxies hints at more to come
The newly discovered galaxies are 62x bigger than the Milky Way.
