...since that advisory was issues, for reasons unrelated to the switches. Hard to see how this advisory would be relevant.

So it is hard to believe the AWD will prove relevant. A faulty module would have had to pass through a repair shop with a faulty lock, multiple times.

It also says that they transitioned 'with a time gap of 01 sec.' The wording tells me that it was not just adjacent timestamps. Could be, however; but I'm concluding that it wasn't about half a second or near 2 seconds.

> The FAA issued Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin (SAIB) No. NM-18-33 on
December 17, 2018,..... the throttle control module was replaced on VT-ANB in 2019 and 2023.
However, the reason for the replacement was not linked to the fuel control switch.

So the module has been replaced twice since that AWD was issued, so very hard to see how this cold be relevant.

No fractional parts are given, so we have to assume it is near a second - probably not a half second, nor near 2 seconds.

Videos of the pilots running the startup procedure of similar aircraft show that moving both switches to on normally takes about a second

So the article is clickbait.

The journalists are tacking on the word 'AI' because it is the trend. Clickbait. This 'hawk-eye' system has been in use around the world for about decade now.

They were really close to going with only one vendor, and that vendor being Boeing. Boeing worked out what NASA's budget was likely to be, and they put in a bid for almost all of it, to try to force NASA to go with them alone. Thankfully, SpaceX put up a fairly low bid, and NASA was able to negotiate for more money, so SpaceX got the chance.

If Boeing had been the sole source, they probably would have got there by now, but only after soaking Congress and NASA for more money - and in the meantime, RosCosmos would have also been putting the squeeze on NASA.

SpaceX did have the crew dragon before they designed, built and flew the quite different Crew vessel. But the experience in building the cargo craft really helped them.

Crew dragon flew one automatic flight with no crew, then one flight with two crew members, before beginning normal operations. These flights were not completely problem-free, but they still went remarkably smoothly.

Because that algorithm involves information that two competitors would not have - everyone's individual costs, occupancy rates, all the rents they are charging, what offers they are making.

And a pricing algorithm of "I'll charge the same amount you are charging" is strictly illegal. And although the software was more complex than that, it boils down to the same thing - using computers to ensure that landlords are not competing, so that rents can be as high as possible. That's anti-competitive.

last ice age, there was heaps of ice around the poles, and that ice has mass. Over time, gravity pulled that mass down, which caused the ice free equator to bulge up. Then the ice age ended and the ice went away, and ever since then the planet has been adjusting - the equator pulling down and the poles raising up. Like the spinning ice skater pulling her arms in, the equator pulling in speeds the planet's spin up.

But if this was the case, why hasn't this been a steady speed up over the last hundred years? Why the steady slow down, then sudden speed up? Global warming comes to mind, as it does in everything, but the mass of glacial ice lost is too small and too recent to be having this effect, surely?

Everyone's pretty confident that this anomalous speed up will end soon, and we'll return to the expected steady deceleration.

Because we know the Earth to be slowing in the long term, so an increase is speed has to be a short-term glitch. How short term? I don't see it stretching beyond a second , unlikely to stretch to tens of seconds, and a UTC/UT1 difference of even 10 seconds is unlikely to be problematic.

On the other hand, we've only had clocks accurate enough to measure this for under 100 years, so saying that we understand Earth's rotation might be a stretch.

These things are in the first stage of being investigated, and we are still in the stage of asking, "Is this a good thing to do?". This research comes down on the 'possibly not' side, with a solid 'But more research' caveat.

We know what we should do, and that's to stop burning stuff. That isn't happening because burning stuff earns people money and makes people's lives more convenient.

For a more practical take, try https://what-if.xkcd.com/162.

If the second crash hadn't happened, Boeing could have got away with it. If the Ethiopian pilots had the good luck not to have been at a high throttle level when MCAS triggered, or had recognized it as a trim system failure abnormally quickly, Boeing could have created and pushed out a software update a few months later and saved their shareholders a heap of money.

This would have allowed them to continue on as they had before, which is preferable in this journalist's eyes.