January 24: Why Boeing Airplanes Are Falling Apart

The Axis and the Houthis; Fraud at Harvard’s cancer center; Israel’s political triumph

---

---

The Big Story

January has been a bad month for Boeing. On Jan. 5, a door fell off an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 jet mid-flight, leading the Federal Aviation Administration to ground the model nationwide. On Jan. 15, the window on an All Nippon Airways Boeing 737-800 cracked shortly after takeoff, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing. On Jan. 17, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was briefly stranded in Davos when his Boeing 737 couldn’t take off due to an oxygen leak. On Jan. 18, a Boeing 747-8 cargo plane was filmed with one of its engines on fire shortly after taking off in Miami, after which it safely returned to the airport. And on Jan. 20, the nose wheel of a Boeing 757 detached just prior to takeoff in Atlanta, a malfunction that could have been fatal if it had occurred a few moments later.

On Tuesday, the situation got even worse for America’s premier airplane manufacturer. Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci told NBC that his airline’s in-house inspections had discovered “many” loose bolts in its fleet of Max 9s, while the CEO of United Airlines, Boeing’s largest customer, announced his company would “build a plan” for the future that doesn’t feature the Max 10, a larger cousin of the Max 9 that’s still in production.  

So what the hell is going on with Boeing? Some insight was provided by a Jan. 16 comment on aviation industry site Leeham News from someone claiming to be a Boeing employee with knowledge of the company’s internal quality-control systems. “The reason the door blew off [the Alaska Airlines flight] is stated in black and white in Boeing’s own records,” the commenter wrote. “It is also very, very stupid and speaks volumes about the quality culture at certain portions of the business.” The commenter, citing logs from Boeing’s internal records systems, went on to detail a series of “process failures” involving Boeing and its subcontractor Spirit Aerospace regarding the faulty installation of the 737 Max’s door plugs, which were the parts that failed on the Alaska Airlines flight. 

The explanation is too technical to explore in full detail, but stick with me for a moment, since it’s helpful to understand the nature and scale of the problem here. The commenter writes of the checks on the Max 9 doors at Boeing’s Renton, Washington, factory:

In a healthy production system, this would be a “belt and suspenders” sort of check, but the 737 production system is quite far from healthy, it’s a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen. As a result, this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations. … I could blame the team for missing certain details, but given the enormous volume of defects they were already finding and fixing, it was inevitable something would slip through.

In this instance, however, the problem did not actually “slip through”—Boeing’s quality-assurance team correctly noted that Spirit had delivered a plane with defective rivets on the left mid-fuselage door (i.e., the one that eventually fell off the plane). Spirit then attempted to paper over the defect without fixing it, which was again caught by Boeing. Then Spirit’s employees realized the door also had a faulty pressure seal. To fix that, they had to remove the door plugs and open the door, which they did—but they never reinstalled the plugs, nor did they make a record of the plugs’ removal. Even though Boeing’s QA team knew about the problems with this specific door, knew that fixing the pressure seal required removing the door plugs and opening the door, and knew that opening the door required the QA team to conduct a brand-new safety verification, the job was simply marked “complete” without any new inspection. The plane was then delivered to Alaska Airlines, sans door plugs, only for the door to fly off in midair. 

Okay, but that’s just one anonymous commenter—what if this person is full of it? Well, on Wednesday The Seattle Times reported that it had “confirmed with a Renton mechanic and a former 737 MAX production line manager that the whistleblower’s description of how this kind of rework is performed and by whom is accurate.” It also “confirmed that the whistleblower accurately described the computer systems Boeing uses to record and track 737 assembly work.” It also quoted Ed Pierson, former manager of the Boeing Max production line, who said the commenter’s account “is very consistent with what I saw in the factory personally” and that there is a “high probability” that it is accurate. 

The commenter also endorsed the theory that the root of Boeing’s problems was its 1997 purchase of McDonnell Douglas, after which McDonnell Douglas’ business-minded executives replaced Boeing’s engineering-focused leaders within company management. These new executives pursued an aggressive strategy of cost-cutting, downsizing, and outsourcing—including, famously, hiring Indian temp workers making $9 an hour to write software for the 737 Max 8, which crashed twice from 2018 to 2019, due in part to faulty anti-stall software. As Harry Stonecipher, a former McDonnell Douglas CEO who later became CEO of Boeing, told The Chicago Tribute in 2004, “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm. It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money.”

That may be true for investors and executives, but for the flying public, good engineering—meaning safety and quality control—is still the overriding concern. Here’s what the anonymous whistleblower had to say about the culture of the company:

There are many cultures at Boeing, and while the executive culture may be thoroughly compromised since we were bought by [McDonnell Douglas], there are many other people who still push for a quality product with cutting edge design. My hope is that this is the wake up call that finally forces the Board to take decisive action, and remove the executives that are resisting the necessary cultural changes.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Gadi Taub on Gadi Eisenkot, the Israeli left’s new military messiah

---

The Rest

→Egypt’s economic growth is likely to slow in 2024 due to fallout from the Gaza war, according to a new Reuters poll of economists. Revenue from the Suez Canal, which ordinarily provides about 10% of the Egyptian state’s budget, dropped 40% in January amid the Iran-backed Houthis’ attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. The median forecast in the new poll is for the Egyptian economy to grow by 3.5% in the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2023, down from an October projection of 3.9% growth. That’s bad news for the Egyptians, but why does it matter to us? Because, as Michael Hochberg and Leonard Hochberg argued in an essay we linked in the Jan. 17 Big Story, Iran’s “attacks on shipping in the Red Sea are, more than anything, a direct assault on the Egyptian economy, and thus on the government of Egypt,” with the purpose of breaking the Egyptian-Israeli détente.

→Speaking of which, a Wednesday article in The Wall Street Journal offered new details on how Iran and the Iran-backed “Axis of Resistance” are supporting—and directing—Houthi operations. Some highlights from the report:

• Yemen-bound, Iranian-sourced weapons and parts seized by the United States and Oman include assembly kits for the Ghadir, an anti-ship missile with a range of more than 200 miles; engine nozzles for the Toufan, a ballistic missile capable of striking within Israel; optical extensions for suicide drones; and drone jammers.

• “Along with the weapons, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, have dispatched advisers to Yemen to assist the group’s naval attacks and the launch of rockets and drones, according to Western security advisers and officials.”

• As previously reported in Semafor, the director of Iranian operations in Yemen is Abdolreza Shahlai, a commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force.

• The transfer of ballistic-missile technology is overseen by IRGC Quds Force Unit 340, “which trained Houthi personnel in Iran and Lebanon and is led by Hamid Fazeli, a former head of Iran’s space-rocket program.”

→The Harvard Medical School-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute plans to correct 31 studies and retract 6 others following accusations of scientific fraud leveled at some of the institute’s top employees, including its CEO. The allegations came from molecular biologist Sholto David, who on Jan. 2 published a long post on the website ForBetterScience outlining dozens of instances of alleged data manipulation by Dana-Farber researchers, including faking results using photo-editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, as in the following example, taken from David’s post:

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that more than 50 papers are currently under review, according to the institute’s research integrity officer, Barrett Rollins, who is a co-author on two of the allegedly manipulated papers. All four of the authors on the 37 papers identified for correction or retraction have faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School.

→Stat of the Day: $8 million to $12 million

That’s the Israeli estimate for how much Hamas receives per month in online donations, “much of it through organizations posing as charities to help civilians in Gaza,” according to a report in Bloomberg.

→The Los Angeles Times announced Tuesday that it would be laying off 115 people, or more than 20% of its newsroom. The paper’s owner, billionaire businessman Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who purchased the paper for $500 million in 2018, said the paper could no longer afford to lose $30 million to $40 million per year “without making progress toward building higher readership.” While the troubles besetting the Times are no doubt legion, and largely structural, Wesley Yang on X flagged a 2022 story in Politico detailing internal tensions related to Soon-Shiong’s daughter, Nika, whom editors and journalists accused of meddling in, and at times effectively running, the paper’s coverage. Nika Soon-Shiong, now 30, is a left-wing activist affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America who briefly served as public safety commissioner of West Hollywood, where she pushed to defund the city’s sheriff’s department. Times employees described Nika’s attempts to shove the paper’s coverage, especially on policing and public safety issues, toward activism, including by barring the Times from using the word looting and allegedly pushing it to endorse her friend and fellow defund-the-police activist, Kenneth Mejia, in the 2022 race for L.A. city controller.

→And, finally, some optimism, courtesy of Tablet friend Edward Luttwak, in an essay today in UnHerd titled “Israel Is Still Winning the Political War”:

In UN venues highly suited for empty words, Russia and China both ceremonially declared their support for the Palestinians. Yet Moscow has continued to co-operate smoothly with Israel’s air force as it operates over Syria to attack Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, while not one Chinese partner has withdrawn from any joint venture in Israel. Nor did the rising calls to reduce the bombardment of Gaza, led by Belgium of all countries and eventually backed by the White House, have any actual consequence—Israel’s bombing was reduced in any case by the diminishing supply of worthwhile targets.

Likewise, not one of the Arab countries with whom Israel has diplomatic relations has interrupted them in any way, while relations with Egypt have blossomed into a veritable security partnership over Gaza and Sinai. Even more important are the statements of Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister, who has made it clear that normalising ties with Israel will not long be delayed once the fighting ends. Even though intelligence exchanges and multiple technology joint-venture negotiations have been underway for some years without any need for official relations, such assurances cannot be overestimated: they are, after all, definitive evidence that Hamas’s assault on October 7 has failed.

Read the rest here: https://unherd.com/2024/01/israel-is-still-winning-the-political-war/ 

---

TODAY IN TABLET: 

Shylock at the U.N., by Marco Roth

Today’s antisemites want to save Jews from the darkness of their Jewish natures

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---

The Israeli Left's New Military Messiah

A joint American-Israeli plan to topple Netanyahu starring General Gadi Eisenkot gains steam as the war in Gaza grinds on

by Gadi Taub

The Israeli mainstream media is full of disheartening stories that say we are losing the war: They say that it’s unwinnable, that the economy is on the verge of a downturn, that reservists are torn between state and family, that students are losing the academic year and couples are breaking up, that we should Bring Them Home, Now!—not to mention the horror stories about the fate of the hostages, and the constant display, front and center, of the terrible predicament of the families.

Read the Israeli papers, watch mainstream TV and you may arrive at the conclusion that all this is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's fault, not Yahya Sinwar's: Netanyahu is extending the war for his own political survival, Netanyahu kept Hamas alive with Qatari money, Netanyahu tore Israel apart over the judicial reform, Netanyahu is sidelining the generals—Benny Gantz, Yoav Gallant, and Gadi Eisenkot—in his own war cabinet, Netanyahu will ruin our relations with the U.S., Netanyahu puts his own career over Israel's vital interests, and so on. These talking points run parallel to Washington’s messaging campaign against Netanyahu, as the Biden administration looks to impose its agenda on Israel, with help from its local clients.

The Israeli press, clearly, does not behave as though we are in the midst of a war for survival. Press conferences have become competitions between journalists, attempting to impress each other by asking the nastiest questions. Last week Netanyahu went off script on one such occasion to answer one particularly bizarre monologue disguised as a question by Channel 13's Sefi Ovadia.

Ovadia "asked" the following: "A personal question with your permission. The public wants to be exposed to the personal side of its leaders. When you retire to your bed [at night] do you tell yourself about, or regret, certain mistakes that you would like to share with the public about things that happened before Oct. 7, shortly before or long before, or are you of the opinion, even in the privacy of your own thoughts, that you are mistake-free, and that it is the rest of the leadership that is responsible for the situation in which we find ourselves. If you'd like to share this with the public, I think it can be interesting." This, mind you, was in a press conference where the prime minister was informing the public about the state of the war.

Netanyahu’s reply was quoted all over Israel's social media: "I'll keep fighting Hamas, and you'll keep fighting me. That's the division of labor."

There's a reason why defeatism and Netanyahu-bashing go together. Netanyahu wants to win the war, and surprising as this may sound at first, the press cohort, along with the virtual representatives of the Biden administration in the cabinet—Gantz and Eisenkot—are not exactly on board with that goal. The easy explanation for this is that fighting Netanyahu has defined the professional identity of so many journalists and politicians for so long, that even Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack could not change the trajectory of their lifelong mission. They see Hamas as an opportunity to finally expose Netanyahu for the failure they wish him to be, force an early election they're certain he will lose, and thereby save Israel from him.

That line of reasoning puts hate at the center: hate so intense, that some would rather see Israel fail than see Netanyahu succeed. But there are greater forces at work here. And there seems to be a detailed plan, in which former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot is playing a central role, that requires, as a first step, weakening Israel. Most of the plan’s adherents don’t want to destroy the country (although some of them want it fundamentally transformed). Rather, they think weakening Israel, and placing it under American stewardship, will help save the country from itself.

The coordinated nature of the anti-Bibi campaign is plain from the repetition of the same arguments and even the same phrases from Netanyahu's adversaries in politics as well as in the press—on both sides of the Atlantic. It is no coincidence that we began hearing in both Jerusalem and Washington, at the exact same time, voices calling to end the war with a hostage deal, but without destroying Hamas (which is what the oft-used euphemism "an extended cease-fire” plainly means). Losing the war to Hamas will surely topple Netanyahu, and thus remove the obstacle to resuming talks with the aim of establishing a Palestinian state.

To forward this campaign, Eisenkot, who tragically lost a son in this war, has been chosen as the leftist elite's new messiah, anointed semi-officially with a long flattering interview in Ilana Dayan's prestigious Channel 12 TV show, Uvda (Fact). Eisenkot is currently sitting in Netanyahu's war cabinet along with Gantz, another former chief of staff. The Biden administration once had its chips in on the tall and handsome Gantz, who nevertheless has little gravitas.

Eisenkot, or so many now hope, is made of stronger stuff. He has therefore been chosen as the tent pole for the joint American-Israeli project of throwing Netanyahu overboard and installing a more pliant Israeli leader who will pivot from the military objectives of the Gaza war to the larger objective of establishing a Palestinian state.

***

The Israeli dovish left has always been enamored with generals, who have mostly responded in kind. Hawks by and large don't make it to the top in the IDF anymore, which is why as our army chiefs became increasingly obsessed with being seen as moral at the same time they lost much of their interest in winning wars.

The left's romance with dovish generals is a faint nostalgic shadow of a once-proud Zionism that was both strong and humane. But our current brass are not of the original breed. Whereas the original breed won wars, the new breed has replaced the drive for military victory with public self-flagellation and moral grandstanding. We have a grotesque example of this new breed, the radical leftist General Yair Golan, the star of the tiny progressive electorate which did not make the threshold in the last national election. Golan, while serving as the second in command to the IDF's chief of staff, compared Israel, in an official Holocaust Memorial ceremony, to Germany in the 1930s. Progressives applauded. Haaretz made him a hero. The rest of us were deeply disgusted.

But Eisenkot is not that vulgar, and not an ignoramus. He's articulate and reflective, and carries himself with dignity. He is also one of those most clearly responsible for the conception of Hamas as a manageable foe that blew up in our faces on Oct. 7. As IDF chief of staff he accelerated the process of cutting down Israel's ground forces in favor of an army that would be small, technologically advanced, and smart. It was that high-tech army that was overwhelmed by a low-tech band of bloodthirsty jihadi sadists.

But the press is not interested in investigating the army's failures. It's too busy trying to pin the blame solely on Netanyahu. And it loves Eisenkot for the role he plays in its imagination, as the U.S.-backed strongman who will help to impose on Israel's electorate the two-state agenda that it emphatically rejected.

Eisenkot gave a superb performance at his coronation ceremony, with the sure guiding hand of MC Ilana Dayan in her role as thoughtful interviewer. Dayan's soft tones provided the appropriate backdrop for Eisenkot's gruff, teddy-bearish lovability, which he used to call Netanyahu—the head of the war cabinet in which he serves—a liar. He delivered his testimony mournfully, with long silences, as if forced into reflection, rather than performing the crude political maneuver of weakening the coalition in the midst of a war, in a bid to hasten what threatens to be a savagely divisive election that will undermine Israel’s ability to fight.

Short of openly supporting the two-state solution, which Israelis are in no mood to hear about, Eisenkot’s message was note for note the same one that Israelis have been hearing from U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other members of the Biden administration and its amplifiers in the American press: that the strategic objectives of Israel’s war have not been achieved; that Hamas has lost neither its will nor its capabilities; that the war has been downscaled already; that we should begin to think of ending the war; that a plan for the day after is now necessary; that there is no military way of freeing the hostages; and that we should therefore opt for a deal even if the price is a long cease-fire—code for resigning ourselves to defeat, and leaving Hamas in control of Gaza.

Eisenkot is savvy enough to understand what defeat in this war would mean for Israel's strategic position in the Middle East. Hamas is the smallest and weakest of the enemies we face. Lurking on our northern border is the far more formidable Hezbollah, and not far behind it, the rising regional power, soon to be a nuclear power—Iran. If we let our weakest enemy get away with mass murder, if we demonstrate that taking hostages can bring us to our knees, this would be a serious, and very dangerous, downscaling of Israel’s strategic position, one that would be impossible for even potentially friendly neighbors to ignore.

Which is exactly what Israel’s left is aiming for. Not because they are evil, but because they cannot shake off the habits of thought which have shaped their identity for decades. In the left's mind, the greatest danger to Israel's future is demographic. I was once an adherent of that school, so I'm well versed in the argument: If we do not partition the land, at some point in the future, Israel will lose its Jewish majority and become a binational, or even an Arab-majority, state. Attempting to resolve the dilemma without partition will, theoretically, force us to choose between non-Jewish democracy, and Jewish apartheid. In practice, the argument went, we'll just turn into another Lebanon.

That's a serious concern. But the aspiration to end the occupation right now and thereby resolve the dilemma, rather than push it forward into the future, relies on the assumption that there is a safe way to partition the land without plunging into a bloody terror war that will in fact turn Israel into the worst possible version of Lebanon on an even shorter timetable. The majority of Israelis have seen enough before and after Oct. 7 to conclude that leaving Judea and Samaria is simply out of the question. What that means is that life is often imperfect: We will have to carry the hump of the occupation without making a choice between the Jewish and democratic characters of the state for the foreseeable future.

Israel's electorate has given both partition and peace a serious chance. Both failed. Israel has withdrawn from large areas in Judea and Samaria, and received terror in return. It unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, and got years of rocket barrages and smaller-scale wars, culminating in Oct. 7. Voters have therefore turned their backs on the idea of peace through partition, as no one in their right mind can countenance the prospect of a mega-Oct. 7 emanating from the West Bank.

In its despair the Israeli left has invested its hopes in extra-democratic means. It has created "human rights" NGOs to slander Israel abroad, as a means of generating external pressure to end the occupation; their journalism became grotesquely slanted against their own country; and above all the left—even the moderate left—has invested its hopes in American pressure. The U.S. will put its foot down and force us to do what we don't understand we should. Our trusted friend and ally, the great benevolent beacon of liberty, will make us end the occupation, and thereby save us from ourselves.

And finally, it seems like all the stars have aligned! Here's an opportunity to end the split between Hamas and Fatah that Netanyahu kept alive, bring the Palestinian Authority back to Gaza so it can govern over a weakened Hamas, and then force a chastened, Netanyahu-free Israel to finally submit to the two-state solution.

That's all very nice. Unfortunately, though, the solution that the left is offering is not a solution to anything. On that score, the historical record is quite clear: Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon didn’t weaken Hezbollah, as we were told it would. Rather, it allowed Iran to build a large and capable army on Israel’s doorstep, while taking over Lebanon itself. Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza didn’t lead to an improvement in the country’s international and strategic position, nor did it help establish Fatah as a stabilizing force. It led to Fatah’s cadres being thrown off rooftops as Hamas took power, then to a series of wars culminating in the large-scale disaster of Oct. 7, and to the construction of a gigantic underground terror fortress spanning 350 miles of tunnels—built with international aid dollars—in which our citizens are now being held hostage.

Israel’s detached elite has drifted so far from the rest of us that it is unable to grasp the extent of its failures. But the rest of the country can see the failure of the peace framework, and the existential threat it poses, quite plainly. The Oct. 7 massacre has therefore sealed the fate of the two-state solution on the Israeli side. To assume that the tragedy that took the two-state modality off the table can in fact be used to breathe new life into it requires a stratospheric level of estrangement from the public mood.

The joint American-Israeli fantasy project of deploying Gadi Eisenkot as the battering ram to open a path for an American regent to preside over the latest version of the two-state solution will meet the test of reality long before any election is called. Soldiers, regular and reserve, who are returning from the front will all have their own firsthand stories to tell of what they encountered. They will not be happy to find they have sacrificed so much in order to leave Sinwar and his gang alive, while installing Abu Mazen's gang as the putative lords of Gaza. The idea of turning the West Bank into a second Gaza Strip is likely to impress them as dangerous insanity.

The Israeli press may still try to leverage the predicament of the hostages to cut a deal with Hamas and end the war. But most Israelis call Hamas "Nazis,” which should tell you all you need to know about what they think. Israeli politicians who try to cut deals with Nazis are likely to pay a steep price with voters. And that showdown may come sooner than Eisenkot and his trans-Atlantic backers think.