My-oh, my-oh, oh-my, a Boeing 777 crashed at Heathrow Airport.
Pelimininary suspicions are that there was a major engine failure.
Hmmm, has anyone got their thinking caps on. Okay listen up!
Back a number of years ago the President inacted the free trade agreements. NAFTA
Imediately upon getting the good news, General Electric, (the people who build the engines for the777) ran, didn't walk, but ran their assembly operations to China.
So with all the recalls and suspect products coming from China, could it be that their work force and their comunist regulations are just not up to par to be in a global community????
Back when the lead based paint issues in our childrens toys was discovered, in wasn't our consumer protection department that first found the lead. Mattel Toys actually made the recall anouncement at nine o'clock in the morning on the Today Show.
What's her name the director of consumer protection ( I just can't remember her name) didn't make any anouncement until the noon news.
While I realize there is only ONE, I repeat ONE inspector on duty for our protection. That means there is only ONE person protecting our nation from fraudulent, harmful, or faulty products.
Yet there is the director, her secretary, and paid underlings using the alloted budget for that department.
Folks I'm trying to tell you, there is some deadly serious problems with our government doing business as usual!!!
Fortunately no-one was killed in that crash, but I wonder how many of your's and my loved ones are going to have to die before our government opens it's eyes.
China also has some of the contracts for some of our most secure radar guidence systems. Is this the smart thing to give a comunist block country who has two billion people in their arsenal???
This is insane polotics giving secrets to a possible enemy.
I am not anti Chinese, as a matter of fact, I put my life in the hands of a highly qualified Chinese Doctor every month. ( he is my pain management specialist)
Lets use those thinking caps for a moment.
China has now surpassed the United States as the worlds greatest producer of polution, and the emition of greenhouse gases.
Their population has an astronomical rate of asthma, and lung cancer is prevalent among it's city dwellers.
Look at the number of people wearing face masks and respirators in all their news videos.
The Yangze river is the most poluted river on earth.
The Ghobi dessert is reaching south by an average of five miles every years, so they are loosing their traditional farm land.
And most importantly since NAFTA we have been sending more and more of our most protected technology over there for manafacturing.
Don't forget that they are a nuclear nation with unknown number of ICBM's ( inter continental ballistic missles) for those of you have forgotten.
So lets just think for a moment,,,,,,,,,,, how are wars won?
There is only one answer, attrition. The guy with the most soldiers and most weapons will always win.
I was taught in Marine Corps Boot Camp,that if you had a machine gun that would never run out of amuntion. And you line the Chinese people up at one thousand people across, and they are in front of you and your gun.
Now if you started firing your gun and killing the Chinese the day you were born. You would die before ever killing all the Chinese who existed back in 1968.
That's the year I entered boot camp. At that time there was only 1.3 billion Chinese!
Use your own brains, our government is no-longer democratic or a republic, it is now nothing more than a greedy capitolist, and they are selling our souls down the river!!!
Well make up your own minds about how safe your going to feel the next time you get aboard a Boeing 777.
Heck for tha matter, how many other planes are using General Electric engines being made in China???


If we don't change the way our government works, WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!




Love & Peace,
John

I don't know if we can just blame chinese workmanship or what but as far as I'm concerned too many of them are falling out of the sky, civilian and military. Personally I avoid planes as much as possible. God didn't put any feathers on my butt.

Laughing in delight at your comment, "God didn't put any feather on my butt", Vicki!

But for myself ...

I don't 'blame' the Chinese people, not even the actual workers that manufacter airplane parts or toys, etc. The owners of these plants, yes! But more than anyone, I blame those such as airlines who decide that cheap items from China and perhaps lack of quality control is far more important than safety.

No one forces the toy companies, for instance, to use cheap labour in China (and again are obviously less interested in safety and quality control). And I've often wondered about something ... they moved things to China 'because it costs less to have things made', yet did we see a drop in price on any items following this move? Suspect their profit margin simply went up.

Perhaps simplistic, but unless everyone makes a determined effort to buy only items made in one's own Country or imported from a Country where safety measures match our own or demand that our Governments protect us from potentially deadly imports, these woes will continue.

I would think "feathers in butt" would be a condition that might require immediate medical attention, but I could be wrong.

I would like to inject a point about outsourcing to countries such a China. One that not many people know.

For the past 15 years, I have worked in the automotive industry for what is called a Tier 1 supplier. Meaning that my company ships a finished product directly to the assembly plants (GM, Chrysler and Ford). I work in Purchasing and Procurement so I am familiar with outsourcing to China and other low wage areas. I have had to do it myself.

Whenever we would take on a new job with one of the Big 3, you go into it on a 10 year contract. Written into the contract are mandatory price reductions starting in the 5th year. The problem with this is that typically you have had raw material increases by this time. The profit margin is tight on these projects anyhow but when you take the mandatory price reductions coupled with the increased cost of raw materials, then there is a problem for the manufacturer. So, some look to outsourcing to low wage areas of the world to ensure that they can survive.

Automotive suppliers are also subject to charge backs from the assembly plants. For example, the company I worked for was charging Chrysler the contract price that had been agreed on for a particular part. A couple of years into the contract, when they were having financial trouble, they decided to "modify" the contract and the price and make it retroactive. We were forced to pay Chrysler $2,000,000. To Chrysler, thats not a significant amount of money. To a facility that employs 100 people, it is huge. Add to that we now had to work with a price that was lower than we had agreed and budgeted for. We were now in a loss position. Unfortunately, quite a few people had to be laid off to offset these losses.

My point to all of this was to provide you a little insight into some of the actual behind the scenes happenings in the automotive manufacturing industry. In every instance that I witnessed, it was the Big 3 who were pushing the smaller manufacturers into these situations. It was outsource or close. And lets stop to remember something....The automotive industry is not just Detroit. There are thousands of small manufacturing plants all across the country that feed the automotive industry. If you look at the total number of people employed by the auto industry, the majority of them are in the average US town in these small plants...Everytime the UAW starts in on something, every time there is a big layoff in Detroit, it is the small plants that get squeezed yet again.

The US automotive industry is dying a slow and painful death and the UAW is one of the main reasons why.

This was a simple matter of windsheer. Jet engines are extremely reliable, and having them both fail at the same time is quite close to impossible. They do have a natural delay between throttle application and thrust build up, and if that windsheer occurs too close to the ground there just is not enough time to recover.

I'm sure the pilot did all he could, but sometimes bleep happens.

If one considers all the planes busily flying back and forth around the globe, it is not surprising that one hears of a plane that crashes. To argue from one such example to a general assumption seems strained. IF there is a problem with the engine itself (and not, say, maintenance), and just by matter of course, all such engines will be thoroughly inspected and the results will indicate whether or not the engine (or a particular part) is flawed and whether this was unique or not.
It would seem strange, moreover, that BOTH engines failed at the same time, and for the exact same reason.
Z

I note here that preliminary information appears to indicate that :

"Both engines on a plane that crash-landed at Heathrow failed to respond to demands for extra thrust, an initial report says."

"It was flying at a height of about 600ft (180m) when the engines failed to respond to a demand for increased thrust from the jet's autothrottle .
After continued demands for increased thrust, and the "flight crew moving the throttle levers, the engines similarly failed to respond", the report indicated."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england...don/7196962.stm

This post has been edited by Zarathustra: Jan 18 2008, 09:23 PM

And I strongly suspect that news report is a misunderstanding/exaggeration of the thrust lag effect.

We'll see when the investigation is complete.

Loks like I am probably incorrect then. Will be interesting to see what this could have been.

Not to worry, derf - our news is undoubtedly going to give us several versions of the 'truth' and we will all have to simply wait until the official report is made.

That's certainly one of the problems with our "news" services, Mara -

they are too quick to report as factual virtually anything that anyone says.


They are also very slow to print retractions - hidden on page 9 within the smaller ads - when they get caught, too.