So gently heat the landing pad plate. No snow.
Now the problem is your landing pad is covered with cats.
Cats: the kudzu of the mammalian world. 
Hey now, I’m owned by one of those. He’s staring me down as I type this.
You can pet cats. Kudzu, not so much.
If we could just get cats to eat Kudzu…
Can I ask the resident pilots to explain this “dutch roll” thing and why it’s a big deal?
The way it was explained to me was that it happens to aircraft with swept wings. If the nose of the plane yaws a little bit to the left, then the right wing is presenting more surface to the airflow. When that happens, the right wing starts generating more lift, and more drag, than the left. That makes the right wing go up and back, so the nose swings to the right, and now the left wing is presenting more surface to the airflow, etc.
If each cycle is more extreme than the one before it, that’s a problem. I thought airliners had yaw dampers to prevent this kind of thing.
Actually, that sounds a lot like how helicopters work. 
Yes they do, that’s one of the things that will be looked into.
That’s pretty much it. Given swept wings about as long as the fuselage, the airplane has a tendency to wallow by yawing left and right which induces rolls right and left, but after a short (1/2 to 2 second) delay.
This diverges after only a few cycles and can result in large (>45 degree) bank angles plus large yaw excursions as well which at the limit may tear off engines or vertical tails.
The combination of pilot reaction time and the time delays inherent in the roll-to-yaw-to-roll coupling mean it is very easy for a pilot to make things worse, not better.
Back in the 707/DC-8 days airplanes fell out of the sky over this until it was better understood.
As mentioned by others above, yaw dampers are the solution. In old-fashioned airplanes (which includes 737s) this was simply an angle rate-sensing gyro in the yaw dimension with authority to gently deflect opposite rudder before the motion got up near human perceptible, much less human screw-uppable. In modern FBW or semi-FBW designs the same function is just one more software module in the flight control computers.
Most big jets have two yaw damper systems for redundancy. If one quits there may be a requirement to slow down and/or descend to guard against the possibility of the other quitting. Or not. Some airframe designs are inherently more prone to Dutch roll divergence than others.
I flew the original 727-100 “stubby”. At high cruise altitude and speed that thing could be on its back in about 4 cycles if both yaw dampers went offline in even light turbulence and the pilot(s) did nothing. If they were startled or hamfists you could be upside down before you knew it. The correct response to avoid making things worse was neither intuitive nor instinctive. Simulator training in not losing control was mandatory and was always an exciting maneuver to do or ride through. Yee hah!
The 737-800/8MAX I flew has no speed / altitude restrictions with one yaw damper out. With both failed there are still no restrictions, but there is a caution to be ready to descend / slow down if it starts to wallow, especially in turbulence.
SWA operates both the -700/7M and -800/8M models, but mostly the stubbier -700/7M. I don’t know the specific procedures or restrictions on the -700/7M, but as a general matter, the relatively shorter the airplane vs the wingspan, the more exiting the ride. The -700 and -800 have the same wing, as does the -7M & -8M. But the -700/7M fuselage is about 10% shorter than the -800/8M’s.
The article doesn’t say which MAX model it was, but does allude to “damage” within the standby rudder actuator. Whether they mean damage that led to the excursion or damage caused by the excursion is unknowable.
Cornelius Ryan, not Walter Lord, wrote The Longest Day.
Definitely not my area of expertise by a long shot, but I think from an airworthiness and design perspective the relevant standards seem to be 14 CFR 25.351 and 353, particularly the latter which came into effect in 2023…
Boeing would have complied to the corresponding EASA regulation, which is older, if any of their planes have a certification basis that required it (new designs or significant changes to rudder control systems in a design as of 2018, it seems).
So, that seems unlikely.
The good news is the design standards for new design aircraft are more stringent, not that anyone’s building new aircraft types right now.
The bad news is there’s no mandate to retroactively apply these standards to existing designs (and it would be nearly impossible to do, I think; just as you can improve your old home, but probably never quite get it to modern building codes, the cost and effort exceed the value of the product).
Aviation safety can be a tightrope walk sometimes!
For those who haven’t read her stuff yet, I highly recommend Kyra Dempsey / aka Admiral Cloudberg. She has many articles on Medium.com in which she examines aviation accidents. The level of detail in her research is very impressive.
The discussion of Dutch Roll reminded me of her piece about Japan Airlines 123, which lost some structural components leading up to its terrible end.
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating after a major manufacturer for Boeing and Airbus said some parts for commercial jets may have been fabricated using counterfeit titanium.
The FAA said in a statement to HuffPost that it is looking into the scope and the impact of the issue, and cited a disclosure from Boeing about a “distributor who may have falsified or provided incorrect records.”
The inquiry was first reported Friday by The New York Times, which found a manufacturer called Spirit AeroSystems had used titanium “sold using fake documents attesting to the material’s authenticity.”
According to the paper, a parts supplier first sounded the alarm after finding tiny holes in the material due to corrosion.
Southwest has ordered the -MAX7, but they don’t operate any yet because IIRC the FAA hasn’t certified it yet. Given the issues with the other MAX models the FAA is understandably scrutinizing it more closely, which has delayed it’s entry into service.
@WildaBeast: D’oh! Thank you.
Jeebus, I’ve been away from this for too long already and it’s only been 9 months! How soon senility sets in! Never mind me; I’ll just pull a Grandpa Simpson, put an onion on my belt, and toddle off now for a nap.
Of SWA’s NGs, the majority are -700s. But as you say, only the MAX8 and MAX9 are flying now. SWA has no MAX9s and AFAIK, no plans to get any. So every SWA MAX is a MAX8.
(inner quote added by @LSLGuy for correct attribution.)
Spirit AeroSystems are the nice people who build the entire 737 fuselage. Lotta ways for bad material to be incorporated into areas that cannot be disassembled. This might get real ugly.
As a separate matter, FAA is churning through a different fake spare parts problem (reported upthread a few months ago) about parts used in Airbus and 737 engines.
Mea Culpa.
Fake and substandard parts are a major problem in a lot of industries. You can’t analyze every piece of material that comes in. You are relying on the certification that came with the item that it’s the right alloy, was inspected (visual, non-destructive, etc…), came from an approved source, not subject to sanction, etc…
Some companies and entire countries fall into the bad source column; maintaining face, greed, outright cheating are among the problems.
Your company has to have it’s own robust quality program and work with suppliers to get them on board. Many times, the lowest bidder is not the answer.
Of course, drones aren’t needed in high-rise condo/apartment environments precisely because of the efficiency you cite. If they’re feasible at all, it would be in wide-open low-density suburban environments.
But possibly a more feasible solution than drones would be the elimination of direct-to-door deliveries or charging a substantial premium for it. Canada Post solved the low-density problem ten years ago when they instituted what were effectively “virtual highrises”, namely community mailboxes with about as many boxes as there are apartments in a typical highrise. On average there’s one on every block, serving about the same number of nearby houses, and providing a single drop-off point for the delivery person. For larger packages, there are a few larger boxes of different sizes and the key will be left inside the regular mailbox and returned by depositing in the outgoing mail slot. Sometimes the most effective solutions are simple and low-tech and don’t involve flying robots.
It’s probably not feasible for Amazon to establish unmanned neighbourhood lock boxes, but they could do what other delivery services have done – either operate a dedicated delivery center where there is sufficient demand, or where there isn’t, establish a contract with some existing store.
I’ll go on record here as predicting that drone deliveries are either not going to happen at all, or will have very limited applications.
And because of trees and possibly other obstructions, that would likely actually be “driveway delivery”. There’s no practical way a flying drone could deliver a package to my front porch. It occurs to me that a drone could do something a human delivery person could not – deliver a package to a fenced back yard. Although neither of those solutions really work in a snowy winter. I’m sticking to my prediction that it just ain’t gonna happen. At most, we might have semi-autonomous little ground-based robots controlled by the delivery van driver running packages from the van to the house, much like semi-automated garbage and recycling pickup where the driver never has to leave the truck.