Runway Hold: While all of the Boeing 737 Max aircraft in service around the world are grounded after two major crashes, Boeing continues to make new planes, and then ground them. Boeing has stopped delivering new 737 Max jets to its customers until the company sorts out what made the two jets go down.

  There are 376 Max planes in service, and 4,600 on order. It’s the most popular jet Boeing ever made, and it’s had the company flying high … until now.

  With customers paying 40 percent of the price of a jet up front, Boeing can keep making them for a while, so long as they can find space to park them. If the investigation goes on for months, or longer, Boeing will begin to see the pinch of lost profits. What follows could be layoffs for one of America’s biggest-dollar exporters, and subsequent business losses and layoffs all along the parts and supply chain. That could put a big dent in the economy.

  The problem seems to be in the computer system that controls the attitude of the plane’s nose. A pilot who has flown the Max says, “I think there is an issue in the design of the system that allows it to be overly aggressive.” 

  In the crashes of an Ethiopian and an Indonesian airlines jet, the pilots appeared to have been fighting to keep the nose up.

 Our pilot says, “When it does that, a big wheel by our knees spins forward so we are aware that it’s moving. If we do not like what it is doing we have switches on our controls to spin it the other direction (nose up). That stops the computer from commanding nose down for about 10 seconds. Then it will start until we command nose up. If we decide we don’t want to go back and forth with it, there is a switch that deactivates the entire system.”

  He concludes that the Ethiopian and Indonesian pilots didn’t have the training to turn off the system in an emergency.

  A former IBM computer engineer tells us that, “The nature of most technical problems is that they have been seen before. My guess is even before the 737 Max 8-related anomalies, problems have been observed. I would put money on it and I am not a betting person.”

The Gun Beat: The body of a 50^thvictim of Friday’s mass shooting has been found in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.

  Gun rights advocates are already pushing back against Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s call for stricter gun laws in her country, where it’s pretty easy to buy an assault rifle. There’s roughly one gun for every four people in New Zealand.

  The Kiwi Gun Blog says one of the shooter’s goals was “to cause the gun rights of responsible New Zealanders to be attacked.” Now there’s a familiar theme.

The End of Recycling: Little known to most Americans who separate their trash, recycling is threatening to come to an end as many cities are sending everything from banana peels to plastic bottles to the dump.

  China, the primary recipient of America’s recycled plastic and glass,  stopped buying it a year ago because there was too much unacceptable trash mixed in. They didn’t want to deal with it.

  Thailand and India stepped up, but consequently municipalities are paying much more to get rid of their recyclables and some have given up, just taking all of it to the landfill.

Out for an Airing:New York police have arrested a suspect in the murder of mob boss  Francesco “Franky Boy” Cali and they say the killing wasn’t about control of the rackets, it was about a woman.

  The suspect is 24-year-old Anthony Comello, a non-mobster who, until yesterday, lived with his parents in Staten Island. The cops say Cali didn’t like Comello hanging around with a woman associated with the Gambino crime family, which Cali ran, so Comello aired out the boss in his own driveway.

  Comello had smacked his pickup truck into Cali’s car. The two men spoke and Comello handed Cali a license plate that had fallen to the ground before opening fire. As everyone but the knucklehead would expect, he left his fingerprints on it. He’s probably lucky the cops found him first.

Last Laugh:President Trump, who can’t tell a joke let alone take one, was wondering this morning whether the FCC and Federal Elections Commission should investigate Saturday Night Livefor its one-sided skewering imagining what life would have been like if he’d never been President. SNL showed a re-run last night and maybe the President didn’t know that because his own speeches are a perpetual re-run.

   Trump tweeted, “It’s truly incredible that shows like Saturday Night Live, not funny/no talent, can spend all of their time knocking the same person (me), over & over, without so much of a mention of ‘the other side.’ Like an advertisement without consequences.”

    The President speculated that, “There must be Collusion with the Democrats and, of course, Russia! Such one sided media coverage, most of it Fake News.”

  A comedy show isn’t a news show and no one colludes with Democrats writing comedy because they aren’t funny. And neither are the Russians. As for giving time to the “other side,” Trump doesn’t understand that in comedy the other side of funny is not funny and SNL doesn’t give equal time to “not funny.”

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