tv ABC7 News Getting Answers ABC January 25, 2024 3:00pm-3:30pm PST
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and the public's trust in the industry. today, boeing suffers another setback. even the faa. even as the faa clears the path for the grounded max nine to fly again. you're watching. getting answers. i'm kristen sze. thanks for joining us today. the faa laid out the inspection process that clears the way for the grounded boeing 737 max nine to take to the skies again and quickly, alaska said its max nine will return to service tomorrow while united said it will be sunday. this comes three weeks after an alaska jet made by boeing lost pressure mid-air when a door plug blew out at 16,000ft above portland, oregon. thank fully, no one was seriously injured, but this mishap shined a light on boeing's manufacturing practices and put the industry and faa into crisis mode. joining us live now is henry harteveldt, president of the global travel industry research and advisory firm. the atmosphere research group. henry nice to have you on today.
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>> hello, kristen. >> so the faa has cleared the max nine to fly, but what is the process? tell us about the inspections that they need to go through. >> these are going to be detailed inspections. they last approximately ten hours per airplane where the airlines mechanics uh, will uh, look at the bolts that hold those plug doors in place, make sure everything is as it should be. the faa is there. they then review the work and sign off on it. so there are two of these plug doors on the plane, one on each side, and uh, the mechanics have to review all of that to ensure everything that they are correctly positioned. the bolts are where they should be. doors stops, pins, all of that, all right. >> so it's not just this okay. you can go back. there's that whole process which you just mentioned. nonetheless on some of the online travel forums, i see some people expressing that they're nervous about getting back on a max nine as my aircraft going to be in max nine. should i cancel my flight?
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how do you feel about it? what would you say to those folks? >> well, look, deciding whether you want to fly on a max nine or night is a nine or not is a personal decision. if you don't want to call your airline and see if they will move you to a different flight that doesn't use a max nine without an increase in fare, they may do that, at least for the next few weeks, because people are going to be skittish about flying on the plane. but remember, these are going to be one of the most heavily inspected and thoroughly inspected planes out there. and so they will be safe. the faa, in fact, uh, required that the airline go through this very detail and inspection process that was more than twice the length that they initially said would have to happen. so i feel very confident about it. and personally, i would fly on a 737 max nine as long as the schedule and fare of course met my needs, right? >> right. i mean, there are two schools of thought. some folks like you say, hey, now's the best time to fly it because
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they've gone through this thorough inspection, right? there's so much attention paid to it. but then other people, like you said, skittish and especially because headlines keep coming, right? like alaska ceo, this week saying since the incident they have found loose bolts on many 737 max nines. how is that reassuring? >> well, look, we don't know what many means, right? is many 5-10 in 20. uh, you know, 60. so we don't know how how much many is it is disturbing to me as an analyst and as someone who's worked in the airline side that there are these problems because when these planes get delivered from boeing, they should be pristine. everything should be in its place and it certainly casts an unwell spotlight on boeing and the quality control or lack of it. and the company's fall from grace when it comes to engineering excellence. >> right. and i know that's what the ntsb investigation is really going to look at their engineering and their subcontracting, their own
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manufacturing processes. but really, you know, even before this, right, we had the two big tragedies in 2018 and 19 with the max eights that crashed deadly. and since the alaska door, there has been, you know, improperly drilled fastener holes, issues with boeing 787 manufacturing and today's stunning reports in the new york times and seattle times that that exact door plug that blew off before it was ever flown, boeing subcontractor spirit aerosystems removed it to make adjustments, taking that together, tell me what you think this says about boeing today and what it needs to do. >> boeing today needs to get its eyes off the excel spreadsheets and the p and l statement, and putting put the attention back on engineering excellence, assembly excellence, quality control. those details in some cases that when the subcontractor is doing something wrong and it's accidental, that means that there wasn't a boeing person there to say uh- wrong.
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and that needs to be there. so boeing is going to have to be far more thorough. uh, in terms of oversight and, and, and, uh, basically doing what they can to future proof problems out of the process when the faa tells, you know, boeing, you cannot increase the production capacity of the 737 max. uh airplanes coming out of your factories. that is unprecedented. and it shows that the trust in boeing does not exist to the level it should. >> right. that announcement today by the faa was pretty stunning as well. but you're right. if they want them to slow it down, though, talk about the impact of the industry. right. because even as united ceo expressed doubts about an order, upcoming order of 150 planes, i think boeing seven 3710. so next gen, uh, really, truly though, what alternative does he have right? aren't we just down to two commercial makers, boeing and airbus, and both of them are backlogged. >> correct. so, you know,
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decades ago we had multiple companies making commercial planes. now it's a duopoly between boeing and airbus. and airbus is basically sold out with its production capacity of various aircraft. so airlines are almost forced to go to boeing, uh, the 737 max ten, which is a stretched version of the 737 max. uh, it has not yet been certified by the faa. and these problems aren't going to help expedite that certification process, either. united has even said we're not counting on those max tens to show up anytime soon . so it leaves airlines in a really tough, uh, predicament because they would like to add capacity where they can travel. demand is strong. and for us, as consumers, we want and need more flights going, more places. because when that happens, fares come down. so it's not a good situation now for travelers or for airlines. >> so are you saying perhaps fewer choices for us and higher prices in the next year or two, or more? >> well, it may not be as many
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choices available. still, a lot depends on, uh, production capacity of boeing's ability to meet its commitments. um, and of course, the state of the economy . if the state of the economy remains, uh, strong or gets better, that means more people will want to travel and it's supply and demand. there are only so many seats going, so many places. if demand outstrips supply, fares are going to go up real quickly. >> i don't want to spend too much time on this, but henry, refresh my memory and our viewers. how do we get down to having more, um, you know, manufacturers down to the two we have today, like those of us old enough? remember what, mcdonnell douglas. there were other names floating about out there. >> sure. so. >> so, you know, at the beginning of the jet age, back at the end of the 1950s, early 1960s, lockheed douglas and convair and boeing were the four major us manufacturers, and there were several companies in europe that also made aircraft through a series of mergers and frankly, some companies went out of business, some exited commercial aircraft production.
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we ended up with just boeing and airbus, i see. >> okay, well look, henry, what steps you know, i know you said that boeing really needs to get his engineering act together. concretely, what does that mean? i know alaska has said we're going to put our own people out there with them to, you know, make sure everything's good. what concretely do you hope to see happen real quick? >> well, i'd like to see boeing invest more in the people hire more people. uh, not just to work on the assembly. uh functions, but but people who have the quality control responsibility and who have the authority, the authority to be on the manufacturing floor and to stop something if they see a problem and make sure that problem is addressed on the spot rather than waiting until the end, when something could be possibly overlooked. >> all right. we'll see if they go in that direction. the atmosphere research group's founder, henry heartfelt, thank you so much for joining us. >> thank you. >> the world's biggest tech
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between the company that makes chatgpt and microsoft a major investor, and now the us federal trade commission is opening an investigation into just how much control big tech has over the leading artificial intelligence startups. joining us live now to explain what's happening and why it matters to us is tech reporter ian shah. ian, always great to see you. >> thanks for having me. all right. >> so tell us about this
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investigation. who and what are they looking at? >> yeah. so they're looking at pretty much everyone you've heard that's related to ai. so you can think of all the big names, right? people like microsoft. people like google. and i think what's interesting is part of the concern that the ftc has is that it is trying to figure out, as you point out, whether these tech companies are essentially wielding a little too much power in this industry. you know, one of the really fascinating things that happened when sam altman, right, the ceo of openai, was fired and summarily and then within a week rehired. was that it was very clear microsoft had come in and really pushed the company to rehire him. and i think that that says something right. it's not very normal for what would be normally just a partner and investor to be able to change the entire direction of a company after they fired a ceo
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like that. yeah, i was following the dramatic tweets and, you know, lo and behold, a few tweets later, sam's back. >> i mean, i know there was more to it, but why are these big companies such as microsoft, google, amazon so invested in ai and the direction they take? >> well, i mean, it's all about the future, right? one of the key questions is that all of us have been asking for 15 years now is what happens after the iphone, right. the iphone was this this inflection moment that really changed the tech industry. it helped turn apple into a multi trillion dollar company, and google as well. right. and part of what everyone's been trying to figure out since is what do we do next. and there have been attempts at, you know, headsets and vr and metaverse and web3, all these things. right and so there's a belief that ai is actually going to be the thing that's going to change the way we use technology again. and if that's the case, there's a big question about who the big players are going to be
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and whether or not the seeming duopolies multiples that we have today will continue, or if another company like openai could grow up and become a real competitor. >> right? right. i mean, there's anthropic, which what? that's the one google and amazon both have a hand in, right? yeah. okay. so let me just ask you, they can't just buy these companies outright. right? i mean, antitrust laws prevent that. is that why they have to kind of, you know, kind of go around it? >> well, they i mean, they haven't tried to buy them so far as i know. i i do know that, for example, google had actually developed a lot of the ai stuff that anthropic was then kind of built on top of. right. the teams that were involved in google kind of left and started that same thing. by the way, facebook went through a lot of this too, where they had been doing a lot of ai work. and now that has turned into the foundation of a lot of the tech out there. but what's really key is that openai, when it released
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chatgpt now a year and a half almost ago, when they did that, it really changed the dynamic of how we looked at ai, and suddenly there were hundreds of millions of people using it in a way that they never had been before. and so part of this is actually about who becomes the company that makes the most money out of this, whether or not they own the technology. >> okay. so help our viewers understand how a company like google might stand to make money from this, right, if they really control this. so i was thinking, okay, i'm starting to use chatgpt to make travel plans. is it going to get to the point where i click on something and it's google travel, and then i'm referred to a flight and then google gets a cut like how does that work? >> well, right now if you go to google and you interact with what's called bard, right, which is their ai kind of chatgpt type thing, i know a lot of people at google are probably angry. i just said that, but the their their equivalent of it. what it does is it actually tries to do a lot of those things for you. same thing, by the way, with
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with micro out there being copilot very similar. it's actually built on the technology from chatgpt and so what what part of is going on is that you may have been hearing, for example, a lot of the media companies out there have been going through layoffs. part of that is because the internet is restructuring itself, right? the way that money is made on the internet through advertisements, and everything is changing very fundamentally. and ai is believed to be at the center of that. so if people are using ai as the primary thing that they use to go around the internet, then whoever's in charge of it, of course, kind of controls the destiny of the future, right? >> oh my gosh, that is a little frightening to think about. if a few people are controlling the destiny of the future. yeah right. but i do want to ask you then, like, what does this mean in terms of like, jobs of the future? i mean, i saw during this whole drama with sam altman that there were offers made by many tech tech ceos to anyone who who has ever worked at openai for like $1 million a year, that's crazy.
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>> yes. and i mean, netflix very famously put out a job offer or a job, you know, the uh- referral thing on the internet that said, you know, up to $1 million for pay. and it was like, wow. but i part of this is really that there is a lot of belief that whoever can figure this out first is going to really take the cake. and it very similar to how apple, even though they weren't the first to come out with an iphone type product, their version of it. right, making it as easy to use and marketing it so well is what changed the dynamic of how the tech industry worked. yeah, so if that's part of the concern everyone has, is this fight bigger than just the us? yes, there is definitely a concern that other countries are going to get ahead of us in the us. and just in general, one of the key players, of course, is china. and in fact, it's gotten to the point now where nvidia, based in silicon valley, has had to deal with the government
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saying, well, you can't sell certain ai chips to china because that's going to help them in their ai race, and we're not okay with that. and meantime, the biden administration has called ai a national security issue and is actually using it existing laws to try and start regulating ai today. >> right? i mean, they hadn't done too much in that sphere in the last ten years, but now they're getting on it. okay, so what happens now? what info do the companies have to provide to the government? and what do you expect to learn from all this? >> well, the ftc is going to be interesting, right? because it's not the same as the national security thing. this is about competition question antitrust. so i am going to be curious to see how the ftc goes about this. right now, we don't have a ton of information, but if you think about how the ftc has been trying to nail down a kind of view of what a monopoly is in the 21st century, right? not just that it costs higher prices and stuff, but it actually harms our ability to make choices. right. and big thing being like google is so dominant on the
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internet that you can't make another choice for a search engine very easily. those are the types of things that i think the ftc is going to be trying to think about. >> all right. ian, shira, as always, you made a complicated topic, easy to understand and perhaps you even gave me a new idea to, you know, do an ai boot camp or something. there you go of journalism. all right. thank you so much. >> absolutely. >> okay. what is the future? we're still talking about the future of downtown san francisco . only indoor mall. the san francisco center has been bleeding. tenants ever since it lost nordstrom. but our media partner, the san francisco standard, has dierov all is not lost i'm peter dixon and in kenya... we built a hospital that provides maternal care. as a marine... we fought against the taliban
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crowd. >> thank you. thank you, thank you. >> nikki haley on the campaign trail in her home state of south carolina ahead of its primary next month, challenging former president donald trump to debate her. >> bring it donald, show me what you got. >> the former un ambassador sang her campaign has raised $1 million on the heels of her second place finish in new hampshire, despite a roughly ten point loss to trump, her former boss. but at least one big money haley donor pulling back for now. read hoffman, billionaire co-founder of linkedin, announcing he's holding off on making more contributions to haley's campaign until he sees a viable path for her to win the nomination. trump, heavily favored to win in south carolina and then again on super tuesday, continuing to bash haley, calling her birdbrain in a recent social media post and saying her donors are barred from the maga movement. the former president also mocking the dress, haley wore on primary night. haley hitting back donald trump, got out there and just
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threw a temper tantrum and out of everything that he said in his rant, he didn't talk about the american people. >> once he talked about revenge. >> meantime, president biden. gearing up for a general election matchup, receiving a key endorsement from the united auto workers union yesterday and focusing his attacks on trump. >> while i stood in solidarity on the picket line. president said, i want to pick a line. donald trump went to a nonunion shop and attacked you during his remarks at that uaw event, president biden was interrupted by protesters calling for a ceasefire in gaza. >> this, after several interruptions at a campaign event earlier this week by similar protests, all of it prompting serious questions of if the israel-hamas war is causing a rift between president biden and progressive voters. joe brian, abc news, washington.
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>> first, it was nordstrom last summer. now more major retailers at the san francisco center on market street are closing up shop. in the past month alone, five stores there closed down. despite the bleak trend, our media partner, the san francisco standard, has two reports suggesting there's hope. today, the new management group vowed to keep the mall open for business and yesterday an inside look at the store owners praying for a turnaround. joining us live now is the standards reporter who wrote both those stories kevin wynn. hey kevin. >> hi, kristin. good to be with you. yeah. >> good to have you on. even though our time's short. but let's just real quickly, yesterday, your headline said san francisco center is dead mall walking. why is it characterized that way? give us a state of the things there. >> yeah, it's a dead mall walking because it's more than 50% vacant once nordstrom left town in august, you know it really set off a whole spat of closures. um and it, you know, perpetuated a rumor out there that the mall was dead. so
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people stopped coming. so um, and until that changes, that's why we had it that way. >> and you profiled a few of the small vendors who saw their foot traffic disappear and they're barely hanging on, whereas they were making good money in 2019. so let me ask you yesterday, i know there was a meeting between some of the tenants and new management group. you reported on that. what came out of it? >> yeah. well, the first message was, you know, they had to dispel those rumors is the message from the custodians were that, hey, this mall is here to stay. it's open. um, our job here is to preserve the cash flow until this mall could be sold off to a new owner. so they're going to invest in more security. and also, they're thinking about bringing events and live programing to the mall to activate those spaces. again. got it. >> okay. by the way, it is the management group is trident pacific right? >> correct. and then also real estate group jll got it. >> okay. so let me just ask you, you know, in terms of the direction they go, what are
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successful urban malls doing these days. like what kind of transformation transformation needs to happen. >> yeah. well you know even independent of the westfield center closing. we were already starting to see a generational shift away from the older brands. so, you know, nordstrom's macy's they all were having tough years to begin with. um, i think we can see a parallel over at stonestown galleria. you know, the more owners can diversify the uses in the mall, bring in new players that weren't traditionally around, you know, ten, 20 years ago. i think that's going to have to be the path forward. >> yeah. and i see that sometimes it's not just the outlets where you can buy things, but experience things. right? it's about hanging out, doing things. and so it has to maybe go a little bit in that direction. but kevin nguyen, thank you so much. i hope folks will check out your articles. >> yeah, absolutely. thanks, kristen. >> and you can find them on the san francisco standards website at sf standard .com. we'll take a sh
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you back here dangerous flooding across the united states. images coming in across a historic church suddenly collapsing. and a young dancer that died after having peanuts. were they marked? authorities with the new recall. first the flood threat from texas. heavy rain from chicago to new york city to boston. emergency crews
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