Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing Highlight

the Agriculture Department in 2019 quietly cut the number of inspectors in pork plants by more than half. Finding defects—feces, sex organs, toenails, bladders—was mostly left to the companies themselves, much in the way that the FAA relied on Boeing’s own employees to ensure aircraft safety. “If this continues across the nation, when you open your package of meat, what you’re going to get for a pathogen is going to be a mystery,” a longtime inspector said in December 2019. That same month, a pathogen of a different sort started sickening people at a market in Wuhan. Many other countries managed the crisis effectively, rapidly deploying widespread testing and contact tracing. The United States stumbled, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention botching a simple test that could have slowed the outbreak in its crucial early months. Just as the FAA had been eclipsed by…