I had several encounters with Africanized bees in Panama. IANA expert by any stretch.
The swarm tends to land on stuff at random and then everybody just attaches themselves as close as possible to wherever the first guy landed. Why this tree and not the one 15 feet away? Why that window or stretch of eave but not the identical space 10 feet away? The exterminator folks I talked to basically shrugged and said “they do that.” There’s no way to make a spot more or less attractive to the swarms. Many of the places are not in any sense hospitable to animals. No water or food there, no obvious natural scent. It’s just a substrate to sit on / cling to.
If the exterminators don’t intervene, the swarm will hang out there for a few hours then suddenly disappear as rapidly as it came. To next settle gosh knows where. But never to be seen in that spot again.
I don’t think they’re out apartment hunting. It’s likely a breakaway hive following a new queen. I’m not sure why the airline had to delay a flight over it but It probably made a bee-keeper happy to get some frequent flyer freebees.
According to the Twitter thread a beekeeper was called but they weren’t cleared to touch the aircraft. After much consternation and discussion they eventually decided to taxi away from the gate. The moment the engines were switched on the bees flew away.
The latest news is that about 2/3rds of the delivered fleet of MAXes & P-8s (so 500+ airplanes) have this problem. The exact response plan hasn’t been settled yet, but will almost certainly be some sort of repetitive inspection program to look for early signs of stuff breaking loose, and then fix it if such signs appear.
Meanwhile, back at Boeing’s airplane kit assembly facility near Seattle, and Spirit’s fuselage construction factory in Wichita that screwed this up, a similar fraction of the partly built, or fully built and awaiting delivery, airplanes need to be fixed before delivery. These now semi-airplanes cannot be completed then released to their customers as-is to be periodically inspected like the already-delivered ones are.
The only bright spot is lots of the already-built MAXes sitting around in Seattle are destined for Chinese airlines that nobody thinks will ever be delivered. So those can slide to the back of the queue to be fixed. Along with eventually having their interiors and cockpits torn out and replaced by non-Chinese ones once everyone involved admits the truth and they’re resold to Western customers.
The easy ones are still bare fuselages and will only take a couple of man-months to fix. Each. Like a crew of several workers laboring for a week of calendar time. Each. Times multiple hundred aircraft.
Once the vertical tail is installed, the effort & expense more than doubles. Each.
You may recall China was the first country to unilaterally ground the MAXes after the accidents. As of today they are not officially grounded in China but since the ungrounding a year-ish ago, substantially zero MAX flights have occurred and no Chinese airline wants to take any deliveries of any MAXes. So it appears the government has said one thing in public and something else in private to all the Chinese airlines who are wisely obeying the whispers in to their ears. Most of which airlines have substantial stakes owned by the Chinese national, regional, or local governments.
You may also recall Trump’s vaunted tariff / trade war with China. Which mightily pissed off the Chinese government. Pre-MAX & Pre-Trump-tariff Boeing was by far the largest US exporter by dollar value to China. Nobody else comes close. Boeing also buys substantially zero from China. They are the perfect target for China to swat with nil harm to themselves.
So the Chinese government has in effect done an “official unofficial” national boycott of all Boeing products.
Every so often, I’d have an occasion to drive around Lake Whatcom (which is big). There used to be a Skyhawk on floats moored by one of the houses. It eventually showed up on eBay (probably a dozen years ago).
