Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report

This isn't consistent with any coherent reading of the transcript:

> At 05:41:46, the Captain asked the First-Officer if the trim is functional. The First-Officer has replied that the trim was not working and asked if he could try it manually.

They've already hit the stab cutout at this point. Now maybe they're think this is like the older 737s and the cutout cut the autopilot and not the full electrical, BUT if you think the question he was asking was whether or not he could try the thumb switch, what exactly would he have been trying prior to that that "wasn't working"?

There is no other trim to try before the thumb switches such that you'd refer to the thumb switches as "trying it manually" when $OTHER_THING was not working. In the transcript, given what's being said, it's clearly the wheel crank that's meant. It doesn't even make sense otherwise.

Through WW2 and the proliferating age of defense contractors, the government (mostly defense department, but also civilian agencies) stood almost on equal footing with contractors in their ability to design, scope, and evaluate big projects.

You would see scientists and in-house advisers at these departments able to expertly evaluate proposals/designs by contractors with sufficient background knowledge and tools to do so. They even worked closely with contractors to lay out the requirements and designs for systems, or products.

But, through the decades, a couple factors eroded this equal footing of the government / regulatory experts:

-- Shrinking of government budgets for (or unwillingness of the public to stomach) the ranks of Washington "bureaucrats" who represented this expert class of people (what harm is there in cutting "fat" from public servants who don't seem to produce anything tangible?)

-- More attractive pay, career potential, prestige, etc. of working in the private sector

-- Political distaste for being seen as working too closely with contractors

So what happened is that gradually but surely, government lost the tools to do these things themselves, and by sheer need to still have things approved, shifted the work onto industry.

What can you do when industry comes to you with new complicated designs for things, and you have no one who can assess (and no budget to pay for assessments of) whether those designs are safe? You ask the person proposing to critique themselves, and in many cases, they seem to know more than you anyway.

Of course, what in part probably led to our current situation.

As I said in the beginning, the pros and cons of operating a system in this way should be looked at.

As a society, my question is, how do we make it possible to choose to do these things in the way that produces the right outcome? For a start, I think we need to stop asking everyone to make uninformed votes about certain detailed things we don't understand, yet rely on every day. That definitely produces bad consequences for many issues.

just because a regulatory agency did its job by protecting the pulic’s interest doesn’t mean it will always work that way. so your example doesn’t negate the existence of regulatory capture, which is an actual thing and not some political propaganda.