Metallic Shrouds

This is the story of Metallic Shrouds: A quality control engineer identifies a catastrophic software flaw that can cause an aircraft to go into a fatal dive. His warnings are ignored by management, who are focused on deadlines and stock prices. The engineer is left haunted by the actual and inevitable crashes and the "faces in the clouds, wrapped up in cold, metallic shrouds." This song is a direct portrayal of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes (Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302). The "phantom twitch" is the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System). This software was designed to automatically push the plane's nose down, but it was dangerously designed to rely on a single Angle of Attack sensor. When that sensor failed, the system repeatedly forced the planes into a dive, and the pilots couldn't stop it. The song's chorus, "They sold the sky for a bottom line," captures the subsequent investigations, which focused on the company's decision to rush the plane to market, only sell a second Angle of Attack sensor as an optional add-on (even though it was critical to confirm the readings of the first) and allegedly obscure the nature of the MCAS system to avoid costly pilot retraining.