Youth Climate Protest, Science Talent Search Winners, Snowflake Changes. March 15, 2019, Part 1
Science Friday
Science Friday and WNYC Studios
4.4 • 6.3K Ratings
🗓️ 15 March 2019
⏱️ 47 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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| 0:00.0 | This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we'll talk with some standout teens from this year's Regener on Science Talent Search. |
| 0:08.7 | But first, this week's air safety regulators around the world grounded Boeing's 737 max eight jets in the wake of a deadly crash in Ethiopia. |
| 0:19.7 | The cause of that crash is still unknown. But the behavior |
| 0:23.4 | of the aircraft in its final minutes was strikingly similar to that of another 737 max, |
| 0:29.8 | which crashed last October in Indonesia. Maggie Kerth Baker, a senior science reporter at 538, |
| 0:36.4 | is with me to talk about that and other selected subjects in science this week. |
| 0:41.5 | Welcome back, Maggie. |
| 0:43.0 | Hi, thanks for having me. |
| 0:44.5 | You're welcome. |
| 0:45.3 | So, Phyllis, what do investigators now know so far about this most recent crash? |
| 0:50.8 | Well, we know one thing that it's definitely a big deal to have two crashes of the same |
| 0:55.6 | type of plane in close succession, you know, just two years after the model first flew. So to give |
| 1:00.1 | you some context on that, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which first flew in 2009, has never had a |
| 1:07.0 | fatality, which is what's drawing a lot of attention to this 737 max. |
| 1:11.4 | You know, it matters a lot that it's crashed twice in such close timing. |
| 1:17.4 | And is this a problem with the plane or how it's being flown? |
| 1:22.6 | So based on what we know about that Indonesia accident, it sounds like it might be a little bit of both, kind of a chain reaction of problems. |
| 1:32.3 | So the 737 Max was a redesign of an older airplane that was intended to be more fuel efficient. |
| 1:39.3 | And part of how they did that was getting these different engines, which were a little bit bigger, so the designers put them further forward on the wing, and that has a tendency to destabilize the aircraft in certain |
| 1:49.2 | situations. So then Boeing has this plane preloaded with software that automatically corrects the |
| 1:55.8 | plane's pitch when it needs to. But data from this previous crash last year suggests that |
| 2:00.6 | sensors that tell the plane when it needs to turn that correction from this previous crash last year suggests that sensors that tell the |
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