An important factor in AA 191 is that the engine leaving did significant damage to the hydraulic lines in that wing - including those for the leading-edge slats. At the time the plane was not equipped with any mechanism to keep the slats extended, so after hydraulic pressure was lost airflow over the wings caused them to retract, which significantly lowered that wing's stall speed.

After AA 191 the DC-10 was equipped with a locking system: loss of pressure now results in the slats getting stuck in their current position. The MD-11 will undoubtedly also have this system, so a direct repeat of AA 191 is unlikely.

Link doesn't seem to be available now:

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You may appreciate this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology

Has anybody modeled what this does to the overall system?

My impression is the system doesn't have all that much slack to begin with. And then to reduce all the major airports at the same time? And with the (current) expectation that next week will be worse?

Edit: this feels ripe for a simulator type of game. Assume X% of ATC walk off the job every week because they have to pay their bills and can't work ATC for free any longer. Assume Y% of TSA do likewise. Assume FAA increases acceptable fatality risk by Z% weekly. Give little sliders for X, Y, Z. See what conditions are required to let us make it to December 1.

More edit: It would be cool to compare this to natural shutdowns. For example, how does a 10% reduction overall affect traffic as compared to a given Nor'easter or hurricane or bomb cyclone?

More edit: give FAA the power to e.g. shut down airports and rapidly move & re-certify ATC on other airports, like regional triage. Maybe shut down Hobby and Austin and put everyone at IAH. Move to sectors, so there's a single airport operating in Texas and surrounding states, ATL in the southeast, etc. Game out how far in advance FAA needs to make all those calls in order to minimize fatalities. Game out what is the date after which air travel becomes less safe than driving. This could be like Railroad Tycoon, except from the regulator's perspective.

> This company might remember their history.

For the record: Apparently they helped the original Nazis. One link of many: https://time.com/archive/6931688/ibm-haunted-by-nazi-era-act...

> IBM, according to Black’s book and the lawsuit, was responsible for punch card technology used by Nazi demographers in the years leading up to World War II — and eventually by the SS, which was charged with rounding up Europe’s Jews. Although it has long been known that IBM’s German arm, which was taken over by the Nazis, had cooperated with the regime — and, indeed, was in a consortium of companies making payments to survivors and victims’ families — Black says that the American parent was fully aware of the use to which the technology was put. And after the Germans surrendered, Black says, IBM’s U.S. office was quick to collect profits made during the war by the subsidiary, called Dehomag.

> The punch cards and counting machines, says Black, were provided to Hitler’s government as early as 1933, and were probably used in the Nazis’ first official census that year. The technology came in handy again in 1939 when the government conducted another census, this time with the explicit goal of identifying and locating German Jews — and finally, Black alleges, in tracking records at Nazi concentration camps.

> It’s this specificity of purpose, says William Seltzer, an expert in demographic statistics at Fordham University, that provides the most damning evidence. “Microsoft is not responsible for every spreadsheet made with Excel,” Seltzer told TIME.com. “But if someone is doing custom designing of a database, they have to know what’s going on. With these punch cards, Dehomag had to design a card for every piece of new information that the government wanted.”

I checked the State of California website for REAL ID eligibility before I wrote my above comment, and it confirms that people with temporary legal immigration status are eligible for REAL ID cards, specifically mentioning DACA recipients as an example of a category of people who are eligible. This is exactly the sort of thing I think should not be allowed by the federal framework governing REAL IDs, non-permanent residents should not be able to get a REAL ID at all under any circumstances and the one for permanent residents should look obviously distinct from those for citizens. The point of this is to make it extremely obvious that a REAL ID holder is definitely a legal citizen, and therefore make it actually useful for proving citizenship or legal permanent residency.

My personal favorite example of this in football

https://youtube.com/watch?v=g4SEPufzG7s

> The French approach of just rebooting and reinstalling the entire thing seems like a good idea at this point.

Do you mean the French Revolution? If you actually read the history on that (even basic stuff beyond the "Reign of Terror") I don't think any person would want to experience that for their country. It had tons of indiscriminate violence and took a decade of chaos before they sorted out into a real government, which then resulted in Napolean's coup