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Why Aren’t We Talking About Boeing’s Racism Problem
When Lion Air Flight 610 crashed into the Java Sea on October 29, 2018, after departing Soekarno–Hatta International Airport in Jakarta, en route to Depati Amir Airport in Pangkal Pinang, the tragedy of it was mired by the media’s biased coverage that almost immediately placed all the blame on the pilots.
The assumption was that since it was an Indonesian carrier, perhaps the lack of training and poor skill set of the flight’s captain, who happened to be Indian, and the co-pilot who was Indonesian, combined with the task of navigating a highly sophisticated computerized system, inevitably resulted in the deadliest air crash involving a 737 jetliner, and the first major accident involving the currently grounded MAX 8 series.
As a Nigerian-American who grew up in the metropolis of Lagos, there was never a shortage of the chaos and mayhem that was borne out of the dysfunction valves that British invaders produced after greedily defacing a functioning landscape, before abandoning the pieces for warring factions to tortuously piece back together.
Our official carrier, Nigeria Airways was instituted in 1958, about two years before we were granted independence from British colonial rule, and back then it was known as the West African Airways Cooperation (WAAC).
