A Pilot on Whether He’ll Ever Trust Boeing Again
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 March 2019
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After the Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 10—and the Indonesian Airlines crash before that, in October—country after country began grounding the deadly Boeing 737 Air Max fleet, and the U.S. belatedly followed suit. This week, Congress held hearings with Boeing and the FAA, questioning them about how the planes were certified and what went wrong. There were a lot of public apologies and a lot of corporate humility. But questions remain: Who’s to blame for the deadly crashes, whom do we hold accountable, and how do we prevent this from happening again?
Guest: Rob Mark, commercial pilot and publisher of Jetwhine.com.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | How often are you in the air? |
| 0:06.1 | Quite a bit, a couple times a week now. |
| 0:09.4 | Rob Mark is a pilot. |
| 0:11.7 | Used to work for the FAA. |
| 0:13.5 | I fly little ones and big ones and things in between and everybody tells me that I'm |
| 0:18.5 | never shy with an opinion,, as you can probably tell. |
| 0:23.2 | But there's one thing Rob doesn't love talking about. |
| 0:26.4 | All the times, things have gone wrong while he's been in the cockpit. |
| 0:29.4 | You know, I mean, I've had a few things happen. |
| 0:32.0 | I don't think any pilot can get through a career without having something go on where they think, |
| 0:37.6 | hmm, this wasn't what it was supposed to do. |
| 0:43.4 | There was that time he had a fuel pump fail on him, outside of an airstrip in Illinois. |
| 0:48.6 | Another time he was flying some folks around and heard the engines start to slow down. |
| 0:52.9 | Then the nose began to dip. I could feel the engine start to slow down. Then the nose began to dip. |
| 0:55.1 | I could feel the engine start to slow down. I mean, I don't know how much altitude. We lost, |
| 1:01.5 | not very much. But again, when it's happening, you almost don't even have time to think about it. |
| 1:09.1 | It's only after it's done that you think, |
| 1:12.2 | and you're breathing, you're going, oh boy, what was that? Pilots don't like to talk about that, |
| 1:18.9 | but, you know, that's where our training comes in. |
| 1:33.4 | Rob's been thinking a lot about who's to blame when things go wrong in flight. |
| 1:46.8 | When Boeing 737 Max was grounded earlier this month, after two oddly similar crashes, it initiated a massive investigation into the manufacturer, the Federal Aviation Administration. |
| 1:51.4 | But Rob worries it's not going to tell the whole story. |
... |
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