The alert system on a Delta Air Lines jet that flipped upside down and burst into flames as it tried to land in Toronto last month indicated a high rate of descent less than three seconds before touchdown, a preliminary report said Thursday.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada, which issued the report, continues to investigate the Feb. 17 crash-landing in which 21 people were hospitalized.
All 76 passengers and four crew members survived when the Delta plane arriving from Minneapolis burst into flames after flipping over and skidding on the tarmac.
The TSB of Canada report says that when the plane’s ground proximity warning system sounded 2.6 seconds before touchdown, the airspeed was 136 knots, or approximately 250 kph (155 mph). It says the plane’s landing gear folded into the retracted position at touchdown and the wing detached from the fuselage, releasing a cloud of jet fuel, which caught fire as the plane slid along the runway.
The fuselage rolled upside down and a large portion of the tail came off in the process, the report says.
“Accidents and incidents rarely stem from a single cause,” TSB chair Yoan Marier said in a video statement Thursday. “They’re often the result of multiple complex, interconnected factors, many extending beyond the aircraft and its operation to wider systemic issues.”
The crew and passengers started evacuating once the plane came to a stop, the report says, adding that some of the passengers were injured when they unbuckled their seatbelts and fell to the ceiling.
The TSB says it’s not aware of any issues with the seatbelts or seats during the incident.
The cockpit door was jammed shut, forcing pilots to escape through the emergency hatch on the ceiling of the cockpit after everyone else was out, the report says.
Emergency response personnel then went into the fuselage, and there was an explosion outside the plane near the left wing root shortly afterward, the TSB says. The cause of the explosion has not yet been determined.
So far, the investigation has found no pre-existing problems with the flight controls, though some components were damaged in the crash, the board said.
The safety board says its ongoing investigation is focusing on several key areas, including metallurgical examination of the wing structure, landing techniques, pilot training and the passenger evacuation process.
All of those who were hospitalized were released within days of the crash.
At least two lawsuits have been filed in the United States, and a law firm in Canada has said that it’s been retained by several passengers.
Delta declined to comment on the preliminary report.
“We remain fully engaged as participants in the investigation led by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. Out of respect for the integrity of this work that will continue through their final report, Endeavor Air and Delta will refrain from comment,” the airline said.
Prophecies that the U.S. dollar will lose its status as the world’s dominant currency have echoed for decades—and are increasing in volume. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts claim that Bitcoin or other blockchain-based monetary units will replace the dollar. Foreign policy hawks warn that China’s renminbi poses a lethal threat to the greenback. And sound money zealots predict that mounting U.S. debt and inflation will surely erode the dollar’s value to the point of irrelevancy.
But contra the doomsayers, Paul Blusteinargues that the dollar’s standing atop the world’s currency pyramid is impregnable—barring a catastrophic misstep by the U.S. government. In his book King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World’s Dominant Currency, he notes the dollar’s supremacy stems from several factors—mainly, the unrivaled depth, breadth, and liquidity of U.S. financial markets, as well as America’s legal and regulatory infrastructure.
Although other currencies have similar features and are used internationally to some extent, none can match the dollar. All alternatives have drawbacks that limit their global role. What follows is the story of one such major currency—the Japanese yen—and why it failed to take the dollar’s throne.
Kaiseki dinners featuring multiple courses of delicacies, exquisitely presented on hand-crafted ceramics and lacquerware, served by kimono-clad waitresses, washed down with free-flowing sake and other alcoholic beverages, followed by karaoke sessions with geishas simpering over the singing performances—that was the sort of hospitality accorded U.S. Treasury officials who traveled to Tokyo in the 1980s for “yen-dollar talks.” Their hosts held senior positions in the powerful Ministry of Finance, which gave them entree to the capital’s most exclusive dining establishments and nightspots, all costs covered by Japanese government expense accounts.
For all the delights of their evening entertainment, however, the Americans generally found these visits frustrating. Their goal was to persuade Japan to internationalize the yen by removing heavy regulations over the nation’s financial system and allowing money to move freely in and out of the country. This point bears repeating to ensure that it sinks in: The U.S. government wanted to make the yen more like the dollar; Treasury officials were not only willing to countenance another currency playing a global role similar to that of the greenback, they were insisting on it.
But progress was glacial. Their Japanese counterparts were skilled at parrying U.S. proposals with painstaking explanations of why Tokyo couldn’t take the measures Washington wanted or why, if implementation were to proceed, it would have to go “step by step” over a number of years. It didn’t help that the negotiations were typically conducted in a stilted atmosphere, with each side sitting opposite the other at long tables while dozens of junior Finance Ministry officials hovered along the walls and in nearby rooms to provide their superiors with logistical support.
9780300270969
U.S. impatience with Tokyo’s “step by step” approach was manifest at one session when Treasury Undersecretary Beryl Sprinkel, an ardent free marketeer with a stentorian voice, rejected the argument offered by the lead Japanese negotiator, Vice Minister Tomomitsu Oba. “I grew up in Missouri on a dirt farm,” boomed Sprinkel, who recalled that when piglets were born, “we had to cut their tails off. When we cut them off we didn’t cut them off one inch at a time! That would just hurt them more. We just hacked them off once up at the top and that was the end of it.” The translation, which took a few seconds to transmit, evoked shocked silence at first on the Japanese side of the table, until Oba laughed, which led to peals of laughter among his subordinates as well. The next day, Oba declared that he had understood Sprinkel’s story and henceforth Japan’s approach would change from “step by step” to “stride by stride.”
As the story suggests, U.S. officials, who were actively encouraging a competitor currency to assume some of the dollar’s international status, were up against a government that had no interest in mounting such a challenge. Japanese officials saw a low-profile yen as a crucial element in their nation’s postwar economic miracle, and they were loath to mess with success.
That miracle was then in full swing. Toyota, Nissan, and Honda had invaded the U.S. auto market in the 1970s and found it ripe for plucking; similar conquests had been achieved in consumer electronics by Sony and Matsushita Electric, in computers and integrated circuits by Fujitsu and NEC, in power generation and heavy machinery by Toshiba and Hitachi, and by other ultra-competitive Japanese firms in a host of sectors ranging from steel to construction equipment to machine tools. Books with titles such as Japan is Number One and Trading Places: How We Allowed Japan to Take the Lead explained to Americans how this resource-poor island nation, having rocketed to second place in the world’s GDP rankings and accumulated the world’s biggest stash of foreign exchange reserves, was on course to challenge the United States as the dominant economic power.
To attain such supercharged growth, Japanese policy makers had adopted a development model based on what economists call “financial repression,” the idea being to use the financial system for the benefit of the nation’s manufacturers and exporters. In the first quarter century after the war, these policies were draconian, with dollars and other foreign currencies carefully husbanded for allocation by bureaucrats to obtain machinery, technology, and other inputs from abroad needed to build industrial strength. So tight were restrictions on cross-border money movements during this period that as late as 1970, almost no Japanese trade was invoiced in yen. These regulations were loosened somewhat in subsequent years, but even in the 1980s, Japanese banks and savers were strictly limited in the amounts of money they could send abroad; government planners wanted a big pool of capital kept at home so that industrial firms could obtain the maximum amount of funding at the lowest possible interest rates. Another facet of this policy involved discouraging foreigners from buying yen in unlimited quantities lest that cause the exchange rate to rise, which would render Japanese goods less competitive on world markets.
Washington’s tolerance for these policies was at an end by the 1980s. U.S. manufacturers were in a lather about the handicap they faced as a result of the dollar’s strength vis-a-vis the yen. Moreover, American banks, securities firms, and money managers were clamoring for access to Japan’s protected financial markets. Under heavy U.S. pressure to shift away from its mercantilist practices, Tokyo agreed to a yen-dollar pact in 1984 that liberalized its financial system somewhat, and during the 1980s the percentage of Japanese exports denominated in yen rose from less than 30% at the beginning of the decade to nearly 40% by 1991. The yen-dollar deal was followed in 1985 by the Plaza Accord, which explicitly called for the yen to rise against the greenback
Although those agreements helped address U.S. grievances, Japan’s economic muscularity only grew more formidable than before. To counter the effects of endaka (yen appreciation) on exports, the Bank of Japan cut interest rates to historically low levels, which drove prices on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and property in major Japanese cities to stratospheric heights. Japanese multinationals adroitly coped with soaring costs at home by shifting much of their labor-intensive manufacturing overseas—to North America and Europe, where their customers were; and to East and Southeast Asia, where they could export their premium-branded goods from low-cost production bases. This process firmly entrenched Japan as the top trading partner and foreign investor for most of its Asian neighbors, giving Tokyo a degree of influence that Japanophobes found disconcerting. One oft-cited piece of evidence was how the 17,000 workers at Matsushita’s Malaysian plants donned Matsushita uniforms and started their days with the company song and calisthenics, just as employees did at Matsushita’s Osaka headquarters. “Japan has established a presence in the region so rapidly that talk of a ‘coprosperity sphere’ is already a cliché,” reported Newsweek in an August 1991 cover story which was titled “Sayonara, America” and lamented that U.S. companies were falling far behind amid an unprecedented burst of dynamism. “This year, for the first time since the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development began keeping statistics, the Asian nations of Japan’s yen bloc will generate more real economic growth than either the European Community or the combined economies of North America.”
That phrase—”yen bloc”—was widely bandied about, referring sometimes to a trade zone that Tokyo would presumably control but also to the prospect that the Japanese currency, liberated from the shackles of financial repression, would dominate Asia to America’s detriment. The yen’s share of reserves in East Asia topped 17% by 1990, and the borrowing of yen surpassed the borrowing of dollars by those in Asia seeking foreign credit during this period. In 1995, in her Foreign Affairs article “The Fall of the Dollar Order,” Yale diplomatic historian Diane Kunz foresaw grave consequences: “As the yen area solidifies and the yen becomes the common Pacific currency, Americans will need to sell dollars for yen to conduct business with any Asian nation,” she wrote. “The death of the dollar order will drastically increase the price of the American dream while simultaneously shattering American global influence.” Later that year in another Foreign Affairs article, titled “Dominance through Technology: Is Japan Creating a Yen Bloc in Southeast Asia?,” Price Waterhouse consultant Mark Taylor warned that “U.S. firms may soon find themselves excluded from a Japan-centered regional economic bloc.”
This ballyhoo about the yen was poorly timed. By the mid-1990s the Japanese economy was mired in deflation following the bursting of its stock and property bubble. Among the authorities’ many desperate efforts to revitalize the economy was a “Big Bang” reform package in 1996 ending all remaining capital controls and including other steps aimed at turning Tokyo into a financial hub, much as London had done a decade earlier. But Japan could not overcome its legacy of financial repression. The nation’s banks, accustomed to being cosseted by the Finance Ministry, were saddled with bubble-era loans that neither they nor their powerful regulators wanted to recognize as unpayable. Seeing the banking industry struggling to stay afloat, foreign financial firms downsized their Tokyo operations and headed for other, more vibrant centers of Asian finance such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai.
Even after further liberalization policies were adopted in 1999, the yen remained a distant also-ran as an international currency. It accounted for 5.5% of foreign exchange reserves in 2001, declining by 2016 to around 3%, and played a modest part even in Japan’s own trade, where it was used in only about 37% of Japanese exports and 26% of imports. Although Japan enjoys enviable wealth, its growth has remained anemic, stunted by a rapidly aging society and dwindling population, so its gravitational pull has never again come close to that which it exuded during the 1980s. The Bank of Japan has bought such vast quantities of the government’s bonds in its effort to stave off deflation that there has been very little trading in those bonds in recent years—yet another reason for the yen’s relatively low ranking in the currency league tables.
Perhaps if Finance Ministry officials had taken the moral of Beryl Sprinkel’s piglet story to heart and dismantled their controls much earlier, dollar users would have had strong motivation to shift to yen. But the opportunity was missed.
The U.S. government is spending $20 billion to jumpstart the Air Force’s new secret fighter jet, even though it’s still struggling to build the costly F-35
President Donald Trump announced Friday that Boeing will build the Air Force’s future fighter jet, which the Pentagon says will have stealth and penetration capabilities that far exceed those of its current fleet and is essential in a potential conflict with China.
Known as Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD, the manned jet will serve as quarterback to a fleet of future drone aircraft designed to be able to penetrate the air defenses of China and any other potential foes. The initial contract to proceed with production on a version for the Air Force is worth an estimated $20 billion.
The 47th president, who announced the award at the White House with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Air Force leadership, said with a grin that the new fighter would be named the F-47.
Gen. David Allvin, chief of staff of the Air Force, said, “We’re going to write the next generation of modern aerial warfare with this.” And Hegseth said the future fleet “sends a very clear, direct message to our allies that we’re not going anywhere.”
Critics have questioned the cost and the necessity of the program as the Pentagon is still struggling to fully produce its current most advanced jet, the F-35, which is expected to cost taxpayers more than $1.7 trillion over its lifespan. In addition, the Pentagon’s future stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider, will have many of the same cutting edge technologies in advanced materials, AI, propulsion and stealth.
More than 1,100 F-35s have already been built for the U.S. and multiple international partners.
A fleet of about 100 future B-21 stealth bombers at an estimated total cost of at least $130 billion is also planned. The first B-21 aircraft are now in test flights.
With evolving drone and space warfare likely to be the center of any fight with China, Dan Grazier, a military procurement analyst, questions whether “another exquisite manned fighter jet really is the right platform going forward.” Grazier, director of the national security reform program at the Stimson Center, said $20 billion is “just seed money. The total costs coming down the road will be hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Few details of what the new NGAD fighter would look like have been public, although Trump said early versions have been conducting test flights for the last five years. Renderings by both Lockheed Martin and Boeing have highlighted a flat, tail-less aircraft with a sharp nose.
The selection of Boeing, which has faced intense pressure from Trump over cost overruns and program delays on Air Force One, came after an independent analysis by the Air Force, an official said on the condition of anonymity to provide additional details on the selection. The Boeing offer was still determined to be the “best overall value to the government,” the official said.
The Air Force has not specified how many aircraft will be produced. In a statement, however, Allvin said there would be more F-47s produced than F-22s, the advanced fighter jet it’s replacing. There are now about 180 F-22 fighter jets in service.
A separate Navy contract for its version of the NGAD fighter is still under competition between Northrop Grumman and Boeing.
Last year, the Biden administration’s Air Force secretary, Frank Kendall, ordered a pause on the NGAD program to review if the aircraft was still needed or if the program, which was first designed in 2018, needed to be modified to reflect the past few years of warfighting advances.
That review by think tanks and academia examined what conflict with China would look like with NGAD and then without it — and determined that NGAD was still needed. Kendall then left the decision on which firm would build the fighter jet to the incoming Trump administration, a defense official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide details on the decision-making.
NGAD will bring “an entirely different level of low observability,” the official said. It will also have a much longer range than the F-35 or other current fighter jets, so it will require less refueling. A future unmanned version of NGAD also is planned as the Pentagon improves the AI for the aircraft, the official said.
After a stormy town hall where JP Morgan’s CEO addressed employee frustration over the bank’s latest return to work directive, Jamie Dimon conferred with workers anew on Thursday. This time, the vibe was decidedly more laid back, according to two employees who viewed the meeting, as Dimon addressed issues including his future plans, the bank’s DEI program and the importance of AI.
Dimon, who is known for his salty tongue, started off the roughly hour long meeting with a joke. “No swearing this time,” he said, which produced laughs from the 1,000 people who were able to get seats. The town hall was held in the bank’s Dallas corporate conference center in its Plano, Texas campus. Unlike prior town halls, the bank did not provide a link to the meeting, so employees could not view it on Zoom. However, there were viewing parties in some outer offices.
Dimon, as he has at other town halls, took questions from the audience. One person asked him, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”—a query that reflects how a successor for Dimon, who has been CEO of the country’s biggest bank for more than 19 years, is one of the hottest topics on Wall Street. Dimon said Thursday he plans to remain CEO “for a few more years” and will then transition to a chairman’s position. After JPMorgan, Dimon said he would like to serve on the board of a nonprofit or charitable organization, according to people who viewed the meeting.
He was also asked about AI. Dimon predicted the technology would be the “next big thing,” like the Internet and computers. Dimon has long warned that AI would replace jobs across various sectors, while making some roles easier. When asked about the economy, Dimon said inflationary pressures were a concern but other issues, like the deficit, were more significant.
A JPMorgan Chase employee also presented Dimon on Thursday with a “Challenge Coin,” a token of appreciation for what the bank and the CEO have done for veterans. JPMorgan hired the employee, who didn’t have a degree or corporate experience, in 2013. The employee is now a middle market banker in JPM’s commercial and investment bank, a spokesman said. (The employee received the coin from Admiral Michael Mullen, former U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.)
In 2011, JPMorgan Chase and 10 other companies, vowed to hire 100,000 veterans. The program has since evolved to more than 315 companies that are part of the Veteran Jobs Mission, which has hired over 900,000 veterans and their military spouses. JPMorgan Chase is a founding member of the Veteran Jobs Mission.
DEI name change
Dimon on Thursday also reaffirmed the bank’s commitment to the bank’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, even as other large companies such as Amazon and Target have rolled back or removed their DEI programs. But one day later, JPMorgan Chase made changes to its policies on the matter
Jennifer Piepszak, JPMorgan Chase’s COO, sent a memo Friday telling employees that the bank was changing the name of the program to DOI, which stands for diversity, opportunity and inclusion. Piepszak said the “e” in DEI always meant “equal opportunity for us, not equal outcomes.” The bank also plans to reduce “trainings,” apparently referring to classes that purported to teach workers how to act respectfully towards various minorities, including racial and transgender employees. The trainings were never a big part of life at JPMorgan but “ignorant people got sent and the company was better for it,” a third employee, who did not view the town hall, told Fortune. (All the sources mentioned in this story, who declined to speak on the record for fear of retaliation, were verified by Fortune).
Some of the programs that were previously part of DOI will now be part of different lines of business, including human resources and corporate responsibility, Piepszak said in the memo that was viewed by Fortune.
What RTO?
The Plano town hall comes just weeks since a February meeting where Dimon delivered an expletive-filled rant after being asked about return to office policy changes. Earlier this month, JPMorgan Chase began requiring all of its 317,233 employees to return to the office full-time five days a week. About 40% had been working on a hybrid schedule—in the office three days a week—since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Many of the bank workers were upset with the RTO and, in February, launched a publicly visible petition calling on Dimon to retain the hybrid-work model that the bank has used for years. JPMorgan Chase is also facing a unionization push among some workers.
JPMorgan Chase’s RTO mandate was mentioned during the meeting. Dimon, like many Fortune 500 CEOs, is a proponent of returning to the office, believing it fosters innovation, career development and collaboration. On Thursday, Dimon said again he believes young people benefit more from in-person interactions.
There have been some logistical hiccups with the rollout of the bank’s return to work order. Some employees have complained about the lack of desks and spotty Wi-Fi, Fortune has reported. The CEO did acknowledge that some buildings in the bank’s Dallas-Fort Worth campus were ready for workers while others were not. In his opinion, the facilities team was “doing a good job,” Dimon said.
Entertainment8 years ago