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The automated driving / “driverless vehicle” industry in general, and its bright and shining star Tesla in particular, have been having a rough go of it in the media. It is thus understandable that any “good” news will be highly publicized and the “bad” news ignored or at least downplayed. In one of our previous posts we briefly questioned Tesla’s interpretation of a puzzling statement made by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NTSB) claiming that Tesla’s highly-touted ” Autopilot/Autosteer”…

A few days ago we published a blog post with the title ” FAA Orders Grounding of Boeing 737 Max-Aircraft”. In that post we speculated that, based on information available in the news media, the crashes of both Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302may have involved a failure in the design of the flight control system installed in Boeing’s 737 Max 8 aircraft. Since our post, we have learned that other sources indicate that we were on…

There were three fatal accidents within a six-month period involving aircraft manufactured by Boeing. Two of those accidents occurred during passenger operations and both involved “low hours” aircraft from the company’s best-selling 737 line. The third accident occurred during an air cargo operation and involved an older, “high hours,” 767 model that originally entered service as a passenger aircraft but had been refitted for air cargo. Lion Air 610 29 October, 2018 Lion Air 610, a Boeing 737 Max 8…

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) defines an “autonomous,” or “automated” vehicle to be “… those in which at least some aspects of a safety-critical control function (e.g., steering, acceleration, or braking) occur without direct driver input.” The NHTSA and the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) classify automated driving systems (ADSs) into one of six “levels” (where Level 0 is “warning only” and Level 6 is “fully automatic/no driver required”). Since only ADSs classified as Level 0 – 2…

What has become a massive chemical fire at the Intercontinental Terminals Company facility located on Independence Parkway in Deer Park started on March 17, 2019. Overnight between March 18 and 19 the Deer Park ITC fire significantly worsened. Attempts by firefighters to extinguish the blaze have been to no avail as the flames engulfed not just the initial chemical tank that caught fire at the facility but multiple other containment tanks on the premises. The inferno now encompasses sink chemical…