Welcome to 10 Blocks. I'm Jordan McGillis,

Economics Editor of City Journal. On the show with me today

is Jim Megs. Jim was editor-in-chief for a decade at the esteemed magazine Popular Mechanics. Now he's a senior

fellow at the Manhattan Institute, or as I like to call him, science nerd in residence. Thanks for joining

this, Jim. Great to be here. Okay, we're talking Boeing today, the troubled American aerospace

giant. When most of us, myself included, think of Boeing, the first thing that comes to mind is

the 737 that we all fly on and the troubles that the company is having there. We're going to talk

about that a bit, and we're also going to get into the space side where Boeing is also struggling.

Jim, very briefly, can you run us through where things stand with the 737 max

and the various legal troubles that have surrounded Boeing on that topic?

Yeah, Boeing is just in a world of trouble in its commercial aviation division.

And the problems go back quite a few years, but they really

came to the fore in 2018 and 2019 when there were two crashes of 737 max jets. The 737 max was

an updated version of a venerable mid-sized aircraft of theirs, that they wanted to add capacity

to it, and that required changing the engine position, which made the airplane kind of tricky to

fly. And they tried to fix it with a software correction that would kind of reinterpret the pilot inputs, but it behaved

in squirrely ways that pilots weren't properly trained on, and tragically, it led to two

devastating accidents. And in the course of investigating those on the lawsuits and everything else,

we've learned a lot more about some, what I would call just engineering culture, or dysfunctional

engineering culture at the company that affects a lot more than just the 737 max. Can you distinguish

between the way that Boeing operates on the engineering side and its rival Airbus operates. Airbus seems to be

really shining as the star in the industry at this time. Well, it's really interesting because

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