The Worship of Mammon by Evelyn De Morgan.
One of the first things to become apparent as I began reading about the deadly crash of Ethiopian Airlines’ Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane on March 10th, was the fact that nobody seemed to trust U.S. authorities.
As Fortune noted:
Ethiopia’s aviation authority is unable to read the black box recorders from the Boeing 737 Max plane that crashed Sunday, but a row is brewing over just where the flight recorders will be sent for analysis.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is pushing to have its experts analyze the data and voice recorders, which were partly damaged, the Wall Street Journal reports, but Ethiopian authorities would prefer to work with the U.K.’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch to ensure that U.S. experts won’t have undue influence in the probe of the American-made plane.
At the same time, pretty much the entire world had started to ground 737 MAX planes as this was the second time this model had crashed within the span of five months. By early last week, Canada and the U.S. had become increasingly isolated in insisting the planes were safe to fly, and then Canada folded too.
This represented a huge rebuke to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which continued to defend the aircraft until the very last moment. In a ridiculous stunt, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao even rode in a 737 MAX two days after the latest crash.
Many people, including myself, saw this lack of trust in the FAA as a watershed moment. Politico noted:
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