Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

I'm Dan Pramak. On today's show, more shoes to drop in the college bribery scandal, and a big tech executive joins the meatless meat movement.

But first, sad skies for Boeing. On Sunday, 157 people were killed when an Ethiopian airline's plane crashed into the ground.

It came just about five months after all 189 passengers of a Lion Air flight crashed into Indonesia's Java Sea,

and it didn't take long for the world to notice that both doomed vehicles were the Boeing 737 Max aircraft, which was only introduced

two years ago. So governments around the world almost immediately began grounding the planes,

which are flown by such airlines as Southwest, American, and United. But the U.S. government

waited for several days, first agreeing with Boeing that there weren't systemic problems

before finally

reversing course yesterday.

The big question now is if the 737 Max has a fatal design flaw in its flight control

system and if so, how regulators missed it.

The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that Boeing had already begun working on a fix,

based on preliminary data from the Indonesia

crash, but that it wasn't slated to be rolled out until April. It would have been earlier,

the article states, but the recent federal government shut down, quote, halted work on the

fix for five weeks, end quote. That wasn't in President Trump's announcement yesterday of the FAA's

decision. Boeing, understandably, has seen its stock price get hammered, losing nearly $28 billion

in market cap since Ethiopia crash, although for context, its shares do still remain higher

than where they began the year.

Its reputation, though, has probably taken an even bigger hit.

And as more facts come out, so might the reputations of those

...