Boeing To Slow Production Of 737 Max Jets As It Works On Flight Control Software Fix
A Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane sits on the assembly line on March 27, in Renton, Wash. Boeing is slowing production of its grounded Max airliner while it works on fixing flight-control software in the wake of fatal crashes.
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Ted S. Warren/AP
Boeing says it is reducing production of its 737 Max planes, and the temporary slowdown will begin in mid-April.
CEO Dennis Muilenburg says the company will build 42 of the planes per month, down from the current 52, while keeping the same number of workers. Boeing still has an enormous backlog of orders — about 4,600 — for the Max planes. That will take years to fill.
Muilenburg says he now knows that two deadly crashes within five months of each other, involving Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines, had a common link of a malfunctioning flight-control software called MCAS.
He says he has asked Boeing’s board of directors to create a committee to review company policies for airplane development and recommend improvements.
Ethiopian Airlines released a preliminary report Thursday on the crash of its plane on March 10. Investigators say the pilots used procedures provided by Boeing but couldn’t stop the plane’s repeated nose dives. All 157 people on board died in the crash just after takeoff from Addis Ababa.
A Lion Air 737 Max jet crashed in a similar way on Oct. 9, with pilots frantically trying to stop the nose from dropping. The plane went down off the coast of Java, killing 189 people.
The 737 Max planes have been grounded worldwide for nearly a month as Boeing works on a software fix.
Such Great Heights: 84-Year-Old Pole Vaulter Keeps Raising The Bar
Flo Filion Meiler, 84, during pole vault training last month. She mostly works out alone, but has a coach to help refine her technique in events like shot put and high jump.
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Flo Filion Meiler is a world-class athlete who lives in Shelburne, Vt. At the indoor World Masters Athletics Championships in Poland last week, Meiler, who is 84, racked up medal after medal in her age division.
Golds in high jump, pentathlon, 60-meter hurdles, and pole vault. Silvers in long jump and triple jump. Oh, and another gold in the 4×200 relay. “The four of us ladies in our 80s set a new world record,” she told NPR this week.
But wait — the pole vault?
Indeed. Meiler took up track and field at age 60, and as she watched the pole vaulting competition at the Senior Olympics, she had a notion.
“They weren’t pole vaulting very high,” she remembers. “And I said to myself, you know, I think that I could do better than that.
So at a sprightly 65, she took up the event. “I love challenges, and the pole vault is a challenge. You have to have a really strong upper body, upper core and very strong arms.”
No problem for Meiler, who was competitive slalom water-skier for 30 years. “I think that’s why I’ve done so well in it, is because of the way I’ve always handled my body.”
At last week’s world championships, she was the only pole vaulter in her age division, though there were a few men in the 80-84 field. Meiler notes that she was far from the oldest athlete taking part in the meet. “There was a lady from India who was 103. … She didn’t run very fast, but she did it!”
All that winning takes a lot of training, and Meiler keeps a rigorous schedule. She says no longer has time to ski, as she devotes herself five to six days a week to her workouts.
“On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I will do track events. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I will do machine weights. Then I will play doubles tennis, but that’s just social tennis.”
She mostly trains alone, but she has a coach at the University of Vermont to help her get competition-ready. “I have her help me, let’s say, with my shot put. And I have her help me doing the high jump and so forth.”
A year ago, she started having hamstring problems and knew it was due to getting older. So she doubled the time she devotes to stretching and warming up. “It makes a world of difference in not being injured,” she says.
The competition may be thinning, but Meiler doesn’t see retirement anytime soon.
“You know, if the good Lord gives me my health, I’m going to keep going forever.”
Right now she’s focused on the upcoming Senior Olympics in Albuquerque, N.M., and she’s eagerly anticipating her birthday in June – an occasion that will shift her into the next age bracket.
“I’m looking forward to being 85,” Meiler says, “because then I’ll be at the bottom of the ladder, and I’m going to look at all these records and see what I can do about ’em.”
NPR’s Sarah Handel and Art Silverman produced the audio version of this story.
Tamino Channels Voices From His Arabic Heritage Into His Own Eccentric Sound
Tamino’s latest album, Amir, is out now.
Ramy Fouad/Courtesy of the artist
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Ramy Fouad/Courtesy of the artist
At 22 years old, Tamino possesses a voice that carries the hypnotic, immediate power of something much more ancient. Born Tamino Moharam Fouad and named after a prince in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, the Belgian-Egyptian artist explores his heritage by combining his own sound with Arabic influences of his Lebanese and Egyptian ancestors. Tamino’s debut album, Amir, out now, melds together the artist’s eccentric vocal style with Arab musical theory.
When Tamino was a kid, he found an old guitar gathering dust in a cupboard while visiting family in Cairo, and brought it back home with him to Belgium. The guitar was once played by Muharram Fouad, Tamino’s grandfather and a famous Egyptian singer who starred in Hassan and Nayima, which is, as Tamino tells it, “the Romeo and Juliet of Egyptian cinema.”
“The songs played in that movie became hits, not only in Egypt but the whole Arabic world, actually,” Tamino says. “He had a very long career until the ’80s, but he died unfortunately when I was 5, so I don’t really have memories of him. I only have his music.”
Left behind for Tamino were cassettes of his grandfather’s music. Tamino was able to incorporate the music on the cassettes into his own music for the album with the help of a friend.
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“She takes the cassettes…she makes new sounds with them,” Tamino says. “You cannot recognize them anymore, but for me, it was symbolically very important that these sounds came from these cassettes that I had all my life.”
Amir also features Nagham Zikrayat, an orchestra of Middle Eastern instrumentalists, many of whom are refugees from Iraq and Syria. “They capture the essence of Arabic music from like the ’50s and the ’60s — we call it the golden age of Arabic music,” Tamino says about working with Nagham Zikraya. “They add this individuality and charisma in what they are playing.”
Tamino says there’s a lot he still has to discover about the country and culture of Egypt. Though he’s visited many times, he has yet to play there.
“The language is gonna be hard. I know it’s gonna be hard, but the one thing that’s not hard is the music,” he says. “It’s the one thing I’ve always had a connection to. It’s the one thing that just feels like it’s in me — like a homecoming.”
Researchers Are Surprised By The Magnitude Of Venezuela’s Health Crisis
Things in Venezuela are so bad that patients who are hospitalized must bring not only their own food but also medical supplies like syringes and scalpels as well as their own soap and water, a new report says.
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Venezuela is in the midst of “a major, major emergency” when it comes to health.
That’s the view of Dr. Paul Spiegel, who edited and reviewed a new report from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the international group Human Rights Watch. Released this week, the study outlines the enormity of the health crisis in Venezuela and calls for international action.
The health crisis began in 2012, two years after the economic crisis began in 2010. But it took a drastic turn for the worse in 2017, and the situation now is even more dismal than researchers expected.
“It is surprising, the magnitude,” says Spiegel, who is director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health and a professor in the Department of International Health at the Bloomberg School. “The situation in Venezuela is dire.”
Things are so bad that, according to the report and other sources, patients who go to the hospital need to bring not only their own food but also medical supplies like syringes and scalpels as well as their own soap and water.
“The international community must respond,” Spiegel says. “Because millions of people are suffering.”
The government of Venezuela stopped publishing health statistics in 2017, so it can be difficult to track exactly how bad the crisis is. But by interviewing doctors and organizations within Venezuela, as well as migrants who recently fled the country and health officials in neighboring Colombia and Brazil, the researchers pieced together a detailed picture of the failing health system. Some of the data also come from the last official government health report, issued in 2017. (The health minister who released the report was promptly fired.)
Diseases that are preventable with vaccines are making a major comeback throughout the country. Cases of measles and diphtheria, which were rare or nonexistent before the economic crisis, have surged to 9,300 and 2,500 respectively.
Since 2009, confirmed cases of malaria increased from 36,000 to 414,000 in 2017.
The Ministry of Health report from 2017 showed that maternal mortality had shot up by 65 percent in one year — from 456 women who died in 2015 to 756 women in 2016. At the same time, infant mortality rose by 30 percent — from 8,812 children under age 1 dying in 2015 to 11,466 children the following year.
The rate of tuberculosis is the highest it has been in the country in the past four decades, with approximately 13,000 cases in 2017.
New HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths have increased sharply, the researchers write, in large part because the vast majority of HIV-positive Venezuelans no longer have access to antiretroviral medications.
A recent report from the Pan American Health Organization estimated that new HIV infections increased by 24 percent from 2010 to 2016, the last year the government published data. And nearly 9 out of 10 Venezuelans known to be living with HIV (69,308 of 79,467 people) were not receiving antiretroviral treatments.
In addition, the lack of HIV test kits may mean there are Venezuelans who are living with HIV but don’t know it.
Cáritas Venezuela, a Catholic humanitarian organization, found that the percentage of children under 5 experiencing malnutrition had increased from 10 to 17 percent from 2017 to 2018 — “a level indicative of a crisis, based on WHO standards,” the authors of the report write.
An estimated 3.4 million people — about a tenth of Venezuela’s entire population — have left the country in recent years to survive. Venezuela’s neighbors, particularly Colombia and Brazil, have seen a huge uptick in Venezuelans seeking medical care.
Health officials in those countries say that thousands of pregnant women who have arrived received no prenatal care in Venezuela. The flow of migrants includes hundreds of children suffering from malnutrition.
Despite all the headlines about Venezuela’s collapse, researchers were still surprised by the scope of the crisis.
Venezuela is a middle-income country with a previously strong infrastructure, Spiegel says. “So just to see this incredible decline in the health infrastructure in such a short period of time is quite astonishing.”
Despite the severity of the health crisis, the government continues to paint a rosy picture of its health care system — and to retaliate against anyone who reports otherwise, according to the report.
Dr. Alberto Paniz Mondolfi, who was not affiliated with the report, spoke with NPR about the situation in his home country. Paniz practices in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, and is a member of the Venezuelan National Academy of Medicine.
Paniz says he has seen children in hospitals who appear to be malnourished — and there aren’t even catheters available to hook them up to IVs. He has seen people on the streets searching the trash for food to eat. And he adds that a blackout that began on March 7 and lasted for a week has had lingering impact: Some areas still lack electricity or access to running water even now, he says.
Paniz says the report from Johns Hopkins and Human Rights Watch paints an accurate picture of the situation on the ground. “It’s a very, very timely and complete paper,” he says. He praised the thorough research and said he was “relieved” that the health crisis might finally get international attention.
So far, aid from the U.S. and other countries has been insufficient to address the crisis, the authors of this report say.
But Spiegel sees some signs of hope: Last week, President Nicolás Maduro decided to allow the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent to enter the country with medical supplies for about 650,000 people.
“It’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the 7 million or so people who are in desperate need,” Spiegel says. But he believes it is a sign that Venezuela’s leader may begin acknowledging the crisis and opening the country up to assistance.
And the good news, Spiegel says, is that once aid arrives in Venezuela, it can be distributed very quickly. “Venezuela has an infrastructure; it has very well trained people,” he says.
Paniz agrees that international assistance will be crucial to ending the crisis. “It’s a desperate call to not leave us alone,” he says. “There is no way in which Venezuela could come out of this by its own.”
Melody Schreiber (@m_scribe on Twitter) is a freelance journalist in Washington, D.C.
