All I can think of is a maintenance checklist for the mechanics servicing the planes. A pilot wearing a seat belt isn’t turning around. He’d be carrying flip charts. Also, the seat back looks way too high.
Some trivia, The aviation checklist system was started by Boeing after a B-17 prototype crashed.
… and has been adapted in many other fields:
It says, “This tag may not be removed under penalty of law except by the consumer.”
Federal Trade Commission
Bing bing bing bing, we have a winnah!
Smithsb, that cracked me up.
And on a slightly lighter note:
Mexico City had broken ground* on the great, new, big airport they need so desperately, when the current president stupidly stopped it in its tracks, for no good reason I can discern. Delays like this are just one of several bad, entirely avoidable consequence.
*You can see the ghostly outline of the Norman Foster-designed terminal in Google Maps satellite view.
I’ve actually been in a very similar situation on a flight in Mexico, so I don’t blame the guy one bit. Another hour and somebody might have done that on the flight I was on. Not sure if this is a common problem on Mexican carriers though.
Thanks for sharing. Presumably, unlike regular wind at or near ground level, there’s no risk of the plane suddenly encountering a sort of ‘dead spot’ in the middle of the jet stream, causing an immediate and large overspeed?
That can happen. There can be relatively abrupt changes in wind velocity around jet streams that cause turbulence and can result in under / over speeds. Not as extreme as losing 100 knots in an instant though.
Once I was on a flight from Honolulu to Atlanta that caught a fine jetstream tailwind. I remember, looking at the progress screen, we were booking, ground speed like 100 knots over airspeed.
Not a good week for AAL, and featuring a fine passengers who I’m sure will never be able to fly with them again, and probably not with any other airline, either.
Also, the terminology in that first article pisses me off, apparently direct quotes from the airline itself: “American Airlines flight 271 with service from Los Angeles (LAX) to Maui (OGG)”. “With service from”? WTF? Isn’t that old railroad terminology? What’s wrong with “American Airlines flight 271 from Los Angeles to Maui”? And then there’s “There were 167 customers and seven crew members on board the aircraft”. Well, sure, I guess they were customers, but that’s more suggestive of shoppers at a department store sampling perfumes. Weren’t they – more significantly – passengers?
George Carlin had lots of fun with airline terminology, like the announcement about “pre-boarding”. What does that mean, that you get on before you get on? Or, “we would like to pre-board passengers traveling with small children”. What about customers passengers traveling with large children, like a two-year old with a pituitary disorder? 
Anyway, these are the recent stories …
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/28/us/plane-hard-landing-injured/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/18/us/american-airlines-flight-attendant-charge-filming-minors-bathroom/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/05/us/american-airlines-flight-punch-diverted/index.html
That last one obviously has nothing to do with the airline, but it just came up as a related article. A quote about this fine specimen of humanity …
The incident started when a passenger complained Fagiana was violently kicking their chair, court documents say. Fagiana then “yelled expletives” at a flight attendant who asked him not to kick the chair, the complaint says. He then punched the flight attendant in the stomach, the documents say.
The flight attendant was punched three more times by Fagiana before other passengers helped to physically restrain him, the complaint said. The flight attendant used flex cuffs to restrain him and buckled him in a seat to wait for police upon landing, the documents state.
Police entered the aircraft after it landed at the Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport and escorted Fagiana off the plane, documents say. He complained the flex cuffs were hurting him, so officers changed out the restraints with steel handcuffs.
“While changing out handcuffs, Fagiana kicked one of the Amarillo Airport Police Officers in the groin area and spit on escorting officers,” the documents say.
Hope that guy likes Greyhound buses.
Fagiana admitted to fighting with police officers after being removed from the aircraft because he didn’t want to be arrested
OK so he is also a good candidate for the stupidity thread.
It is VERY hard to successfully convict somebody for the federal offense of interfering with flight crew. It is trivial to convict somebody for the state charge of assaulting a police officer and/or resisting arrest.
Bravo there Einstein; well done!!
From the paywalled Wall Street Journal:
Bolts needed to secure part of an Alaska Airlines jet that blew off in midair appear to have been missing when the plane left Boeing factory. Boeing and other industry officials increasingly believe the plane maker’s employees failed to put back the bolts when they reinstalled a 737 MAX 9 plug door after opening or removing it during production, according to people familiar with the matter. The increasingly likely scenario, according to some of these people, is based partly on an apparent absence of markings on the Alaska door plug itself that would suggest bolts were in place when it blew off the jet around 16,000 feet over Oregon on Jan. 5.They also pointed to paperwork and process lapses at Boeing’s Renton, Wash., factory related to the company’s work on the plug door.
So the belief that it was failures of Boeing suppliers that was the problem is wrong.
From a strict airworthiness perspective, Boeing is the Type Certificate Holder and Manufacturing certificate holder, and therefore holds the ultimate responsibility for the airworthiness of the design in general and for each individual aircraft (barring, I guess, deliberate and malicious damage caused by someone).
Suppliers and production processes needed oversight by Boeing just as Boeing needed oversight by the FAA.
So. Many. Failure. Points.
Why?
And in other (stinky) aviation news: Farting Passenger Causes American Airlines Flight to Return to Gate
It seems there is nothing wrong with the design of those doors. They have been used for a long time with no problem. It was the lack of quality control during manufacture which allowed the plane to be assembled without the necessary bolts that is the problem in this case.
That doesn’t explain the “loose bolts” found on other planes.
Do the airlines have any no-fly agreement amongst themselves?
That is a pretty clever one, right there! 