Model Airplanes

Do you toil in the pressure cooker of a firm, but dream of going in-house? Many lawyers have that goal. But the churn works in the other direction, too, with in-house lawyers migrating to firms or solo practice. When they do, they can face conflict of interest issues leading to disqualification, as a former in-house lawyer for Rolls-Royce discovered earlier this year.

A luxury ride

Donald Little was in-house counsel for Rolls-Royce for more than 10 years. A couple years after he left, he represented Rolls-Royce as outside counsel in a suit by Davis S.R. Aviation, defending against allegations that Rolls-Royce made false statements about airplane engine parts in order to prevent Davis from selling engines on the open market. That case settled.

Then, in 2016, a different plaintiff filed suit against Rolls-Royce under the False Claims Act, but based on the same constellation of facts as Davis, centering on the alleged use of defective parts in a U.S. Air Force aircraft. The qui tam plaintiff alleged that Rolls-Royce improperly used the parts, resulting in a crash, and that it submitted false documents and invoices for payment to the air force.

Little became one of the lawyers for the qui tam plaintiff in the False Claims Act case.

Rolls-Royce moved to disqualify Little, as well as to dismiss the case. The magistrate judge recommended disqualification and dismissal, and the U.S. district court for the Western District of Texas overruled the plaintiff’s objections and accepted the recommendation.

The rubber meets the road

In its

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Continuing, he said he plans to make the area a prim tourist attraction: ”I would like to make a small attraction here, with a motor-cross track and a football pitch, so people can look inside the plane and watch the sports from inside, too.”

The Boeing 747 became an iconic domestic aircraft, since it first started taking passengers between London and New York in 1970.

Some airlines still have the model in use – but many airlines have retired their fleet of jumbo jets, replacing them with smaller and more fuel-efficient models, such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the new Airbus A350.

British Airways still fly passengers using 64 Boeing 747s – but plan to retire the fleet by 2024.

Article source: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/986883/Thailand-boeing-747-aircraft-mystery-confusion-appears-field-overnigh

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/us/politics/trump-china-trade-war.html

On July 1, Elon Musk went home to sleep. The chief executive of Tesla Inc. had been camping out at his electric car factory in Fremont, Calif., for much of the past week. He’d been sleeping on a couch, or under a desk, as part of a companywide push to get out of what he calls “production hell” by manufacturing at least 5,000 of Tesla’s new Model 3 sedans in a week. “I was wearing the same clothes for five days,” Musk says in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “My credibility, the credibility of the whole team,” was at stake.

Musk initially promised as many as 200,000 Model 3s by the end of 2017. To get there he planned an unprecedented investment in factory robots, calling the production line “the machine that builds the machine.” He’d said it would look like “alien dreadnought”—a manufacturing process so futuristic, unstoppable, and cost-effective that it would seem extraterrestrial.

It hasn’t worked out that way. Tesla ended 2017 having made not quite 2,700 Model 3s. As of the end of June it had turned out about 41,000, and some analysts express doubts about whether it will ever be able to show a profit on the car, and Tesla hasn’t even started selling the $35,000 base model.

Making matters worse, Tesla has $10 billion in debt and suffered a credit downgrade in March. It’s spent about a billion dollars more per quarter, on average, than

Article source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-12/how-tesla-s-model-3-became-elon-musk-s-version-of-hell