The Changing Faces of Flight Safety

 John Gibson

Oct 31, 2022

Research Report

ENGL 1020 253

College Writing II

Prof. Stockwell

Prologue

Through this project, I want to learn how the safety of passenger flights has improved over the past 50 years.

Over the last 2 years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, air traveling around the world

slowed to a grinding halt, but it quickly recovered to its former full capacity in this coming

holiday season of the year 2022. The conflict of interest between FAA and Boeing was

exposed in the middle of the pandemic after two fatal crashes of Boeing 737Max, killing 346

people, with a congressional hearing and the replacement of Boeing's CEO Dennis

Muilenberg. I am interested in filling the passenger jet safety history gap between now

and 50 years ago. I will figure out whether the dysfunction of FAA oversight was an isolated

instance and whether air travel is safer now than ever. The conventional wisdom of the

economic world is that every 25 years, people forget about the lessons that the previous

generation learned. The conflict of interest between FAA and Boeing does not amount to a

true scandal because the aviation industry quickly recovered, but there was a real estate

subprime scandal and Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme of 2008, twelve years ago, with lasting

scars on the US economy. Maybe, thirteen years from now, AI, artificial intelligence, will

become part of aviation in some capacity, ticket pricing of flights or traffic control, or piloting

itself. Maybe/Maybe not the storage of the planes in the deserts during the pandemic may

become a true scandal waiting to be exposed two months from now. It is my interest to find

out if scandals recur in some pattern because I am in the School of Engineering at UMass,

Lowell, myself. My own career is at stake.

I will focus on Boeing 737’s safety history because the 737Max variant was at the

center of the congressional hearing, and my personal experience is that the 737 is so

ubiquitous in the US flight schedules that it is unavoidable for any air travel in the coming

holiday season. Human lives are valuable. Compensations can not substitute maternal

affection for a person’s development when a child’s parent is killed in an accident. I prefer not

to look away without figuring out if victims lost their lives in vain.

 My only research writing experience was a high school remote-learning year writing

comparing COVID-19 with historical plaques in the middle of the pandemic. And Nashua High North required the writing assignment of 5 pages with 5 proper MLA citations.

 

The Changing Faces of Flight Safety

“The lure of flying is the lure of beauty.”

Amelia Earhart

Fact: Boeing 737 is about to be grounded again, according to this month’s MSN news article “Boeing 737 MAX Could Be Grounded Again,” which states that only ten percent of the required safety recommendation implementations have been certified. Just as the American people are preparing and arranging their travel for the holiday season, it is always the time when the machine or gadget becomes essential when it goes out of order, in my perception. Are perceptions indicative of reality? Are perceptions reliable? I may not be the only one experiencing the drift of mind at the airport terminal. Psychologist Carl Jung famously posed why people of all cultures have the motif of dragons in their folklore and mythology and why archetypes of heroes and villains. I can only guess that the pending danger in the liminal space of an airport terminal induces universal wandering thoughts. Over the past two years, people experienced the story of their life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Zooms became an essential part of education, remote work became routine, and vehicles have been stored away, sometimes in deserts, subjected to weathering and hostile elements of nature. The airworthiness of passenger jets is a genuine concern. But the strangers in the terminal seem sophisticated and know some things that others do not. They pace briskly and calmly. Perhaps a closer look at safety history can give readers the same sense of calmness. To clarify rational thoughts from perceptions, I propose to review the history of the safety of Boeing 737 in three focus points, the aviation culture of the 1990s, the incremental safety improvements of the 2000s, and the recent crises. 

But, to understand the people involved in the topic, curious readers may want to know where the government representatives came from and their background. Throughout my search, I found a particular figure reappearing in documentary films. Air crash investigation documentaries often hire professional actors to reenact the pilot, the first officer, and the flight stewards, giving them great attention. The National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB, officials were only given a one-line credit with their names. The figure I feel most compelled to tell their story is NTSB investigator Thomas Haueter. Born in Enon, Ohio, on December 12, 1951, according to imdb.com, Thomas Haueter is an American engineer famous for leading the investigation of the faulty vertical stabilizer servo on Boeing 737 passenger airplanes that killed more than 200 people between the years 1991 and 1994 as reported by Bill Adair. The investigation was noted for its technical difficulty and was regarded as the longest investigation of any aeronautic accident up to that point. The investigation reached a preliminary conclusion in 1996 with a Boeing Alert Bulletin entry, but the exposure of the faulty mechanical design implied that countless passengers had been on the unsafe Boeing 737 for more than a decade and that passengers were fortunate to escape catastrophic disasters without awareness (imdb.com; Adair, 2004). 

Thomas Haueter was originally trained as a commercial pilot before attending college but changed his career to studying aeronautics and space engineering, graduating from Purdue University, Indiana, with a bachelor’s degree (ohsonline.com, 2012). According to ohsonline, he joined the NTSB, National Transportation Safety Board, in 1984, as an airworthiness investigator, and was promoted to a full investigator-in-charge a few years later as reported in aviationpros.com (ohsonline.com, 2012; aviationpros.com, 2007). According to ohsonline, he was the primary author of hundreds of safety reviews of aviation accidents in NTSB  (ohsonline.com, 2012). Air travel safety, as we people knew it, might be different without NTSB’s workers’ dedication for so many decades. 

Thomas Haueter retired from NTSB in June 2012 and moved on to consulting careers in the private sector (tampabay.com, 2019). His retirement received great fanfare in the engineering community with the closure of the high-profile investigation of USAir flight 1549 bird strike over LaGuardia and ditching in the Hudson River when the NTSB managing director admired his “political sensitivity” (ohsonline.com, 2012). Thomas Haueter had been interviewed and given video testaments in many documentary films, so much so that the IMDb online database for filmmakers had his own entry page. The book “The Mystery of Flight 427” credits him, among others, for the improvement of Boeing 737’s safety (Adair, 2004).

However, I noticed that I was not acquainted with the era involving Thomas Haueter’s major contributions when the Internet was not ubiquitous as today. I could only find more information about it through news articles and books. The early 1990s was a time of optimism in the US. President Bill Clinton was elected and inaugurated in January 1993, with a promising campaign focused on the economy. The short Persian Gulf War started in 1990 and ended in 1991 with precision bombings aided by GPS. In 1994, FAA rectified GPS use in commercial airlines for the first time (timeandnavigation.si.edu, 2014). The era popularized cell phone use, with the first slick flip-phone design unleashed by Motorola one year later, in 1995. It had been two decades after Frontier Airline hired the first-ever female major-airline pilot Emily Howell Warner and made headline news in 1973 (planeandpilotmag, 2020). By 1994, there were multiple female first officers in USAir (Adair, 2004). Microsoft was about to make its first browser for the Internet in 1995 (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Travel agencies sold flight tickets in physical offices. It was not a perfect year, however. Airline crashes occurred annually in this era, but not frequently. Three major airline crashes occurred in 1994 in the US, two with USAir and one with American Eagle. Among the three crashes, USAir flight 427 had the highest fatality at 132, more than double the other two crashes (Adair, 2004). 

According to NTSB official report, on September 8th, 1994, USAir flight 427 crashed in Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh International Airport in the early evening, killing everyone onboard. The plane was the Boeing 737-3 series. The time was 2 minutes past 7 PM when the first sign of a problem appeared. The plane was on its final approach when the vertical stabilizer malfunctioned, tilting the plane sharply to the right. Due to the low altitude of the final approach, the problem was unrecoverable. The wing’s flap was at the first down position when the pilot prepared it for the final approach and when it hit the ground. The plane crashed within one minute of the first sign of the problem and within 5 miles of the runway (Adair, 2004).

After reading about the work of NTSB, I was intrigued. I went to Washing DC for a visit in the summer of 2019. Located in Washington, DC, National Transportation Safety Board is an independent agency directly under the federal executive branch. It was split from the Department of Transportation in 1975 with the federal Independent Safety Board Act (Congress, 1994). The current chairwoman is Jennifer Homendy, appointed by former president Donald Trump. Independent agencies outside cabinet departments and directly under the president include the CIA and FCC. Understandably, most federal independent agencies established themselves close to Washington, DC. The Potomac River runs along the west side of Capital Hill, so the agencies cluster on the river shore neighborhoods. L'Enfant Plaza houses NTSB’s headquarters on the east shore. On the west shore, the Langley headquarters of the CIA is about 6 miles west of NTSB. Lincoln Memorial is within walking distance of L'Enfant Plaza. However, for more recreation, the nearby National Harbor is an area with waterfront dining, a shopping mall, and a Ferris wheel, about 5 miles south of NTSB. The general feature of the six miles west of NTSB is a dense highway system with substantial maintenance. Amazon has a large data center built in the area as part of the communication artery (Sverdlik, 2015). The buildings for the vital data center facilities are tall and imposing. The federal workers in Washington, DC, may have long careers in the area. The former NTSB aviation safety director Thomas Haueter has a career spanning 28 years with NTSB, gaining expertise and experience (Adair, 2004).

The workers of NTSB are frequently away from the headquarters, though. The airworthiness investigator has broad authority and legislated power to acquire manufacturers' necessary assistance and equipment. The “goto” team’s workplace is often the hotel rooms with extra phone lines (Adair, 2004, p28). In investigating USAir flight 427’s crash, Thomas Haueter boarded over a dozen flights with the Boeing 737-3 series to acquaint himself with the 737 models (Adair, 2004).

But, back to my topic of making sense of flight safety in the US, I must focus, first, on the baseline safety culture of the early 1990s. The drifting mind is what introduces irrational thoughts. The economic optimism of the 1990s brought about steady growth in air travel volume. It was not unusual during the 90s for airlines to report a 12 percent growth in year-to-year ticket booking volume (Durbin, 1992). However, on a second look of the safety record of the Boeing 737 series, several design defects of the 737 inflicted substantial human tolls during the early 90s. One of the most infamous cases was the faulty vertical stabilizer servo that killed more than 200 Americans between the years 1991 and 1994 as reported by Bill Adair. And that coincided with the peculiar phenomenon of the 1990s - the stardom of the crash investigators. Aviation investigator, Thomas Haueter, became famous enough to require an IMDb web page for filmmakers for leading the investigation of the faulty vertical stabilizer servo (imdb.com; Adair, 2004).

The stardom of investigators allowed the public to entrust NTSB and allowed NTSB to establish its reputation in the public mind in the 90s. By the 1990s, all NTSB branch offices were well-equipped to handle technical investigations and the expertise of crash investigators was substantial. Based on the prominent media exposure of the NTSB, however, it can be argued that the 1990s, however optimistic, was more eventful for the transportation industry and therefore less safe for the vehicle of transportation itself (Adair, 2004).

Second, with the major design flaws fixed in the 90s, the safety record of the Boeing 737 series steadily improved in the 2000s. The well-known rule of thumb of crash investigators in the 2000s was that 80 percent of all crashes were human errors (ebscohost.com, 2006). The chairperson of the NTSB was Deborah Hersman (Mathai, 2013). According to NBC interview, Deborah Hersman was a full investigator since the George W. Bush administration and was nominated to lead NTSB by then-president Obama. The NTSB aviation investigation team was not in the news spotlight around the time of the chairwoman’s appointment, and she only came to media attention after the Asiana flight crash with Boeing 777 (Mathai, 2013). According to the same NBC article, the chairwoman was not a pilot at all, and indeed, she led as many train transportation accident investigations as air transportation accident investigations in the news article (Mathai, 2013). This was in stark contrast to the background of the 90s star aviation investigators, such as Thomas Haueter, who was trained as a commercial airline pilot and had a prestigious engineering degree (ohsonline.com, 2012). The face representing NTSB of the 2000s was a 43-year-old mother of three, Mrs. Hersman. The atmosphere in air travel in the 2000s could be characterized as relaxed and laidback. 

Aircraft manufacturers gained confidence during this era. For example, Boeing wasn’t concerned about liability when speaking to the media under dire implications of cabin depressurization in 2005’s crash of Helios Flight 522 (Fabey, 2010). The spotlight was once again on the Boeing 737. But, according to Helena Smith’s article “The Strange Fate of Flight ZU522, the pilot error was suspected from the start (Smith, 2005). The dramatic human error of the 2005 crash cemented the popular perception that machines were more perfect than human pilots and that mechanical design could always be improved incrementally. On the other spectrum of popular perceptions, conspiracy and irrational thoughts brewed in the public’s mind (Smith, 2005).

Finally, I saw how passengers’ perceptions changed over the three decades. With the public’s perception that passenger plane designs were perfect and that nothing much more was to be improved in mind, the recent crisis of Boeing 737 Max mechanical problems could be quite shocking to untrained eyes. The expectation was the source of disappointment and the hysteria of public affairs during the COVID-19 pandemic could have exacerbated the irrational thoughts of the public. In any case, Boeing was back in the media spotlight during the 2019 congressional hearing that resulted in the resignation of former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenberg (Selinger, 2019). 

But thoughts and actions could be two different things. According to UK’s ENP Newswire, in July 2022, most airlines reported that flight bookings mostly recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic (ebscohost.com, 2022). Passengers made decisions not differently from pre-pandemic time. The lingering thought was whether the MCAS system of the 737Max was tested rigorously. Boeing’s own words were that pitot air flow detector redundancy had been implemented in most Max planes during the pandemic slowdown and that MCAS software had been fixed to give pilots higher priority than the software. The ongoing work is training all pilots to be aware of the MCAS software and the true aerodynamics of 737Max (boeing.com, 2022). However, government agencies were acting and safeguarding the industry again. The legal hurdle for a pending grounding of 737Max was the ongoing, incomplete training of pilots to be specially certified in 737Max qualification and the ongoing addition of a cockpit alert display (King, 2022). In the informed eyes, however, the wait for a new machine to be thoroughly tested might not be new since the 1990s. The trust in the NTSB might still be the same since the 1990s despite the changing persona of the engineers’ faces. I believe in Psychologist Carl Jung’s theory that all humans have universal fears and aspirations with countless experimental support. However, I still preferred to witness the American public’s perception first-hand. So, I conducted a survey two weeks before Thanksgiving of 2022 with 21 participants.

One of my survey questions asks the respondent if they have booked or planned to book a flight for the holiday season. Slightly over 50 percent of respondents have plans to take a flight. This question is meant to correlate with further question responses and contrast, at the individual level, whether booking a flight heightens a person’s concern about flight safety and concerned about government oversight of safety. So, a nearly fifty-fifty split is a good contrast for statistical inferences because both categories have many participants. 

Specifically, 11 people have booked or planned to book a flight. It is logical that if a person is engaged in an activity, they should be more concerned about the safety of that activity. But, by how much fear are they more concerned?  My survey question subsequently asks the respondent if they have heard about Boeing 737 Max’s safety problems. And 60 percent of respondents have heard about the issues from news media/channels. It would be interesting to correlate whether the people who have booked flights in the previous question are more attuned to news about flight crashes. However, 8 out of the 11 people, 72 percent, well below 100 percent, who have booked or planned to book a flight for the holiday season say that they know the news of crashes. So, the statistics suggest that the passengers don’t have heightened concerns about the plane’s safety overall because they are not even in tune with the bad news about their aircraft! This result fits my speculation after my journey in this research paper on the public figures representing flight safety. The representatives of NTSB and Boeing CEOs change over time, and consumers pick and choose the news they want to receive according to the trust psychology afforded by the faces they trust. As the Raegan Administration advisor Lee Atwater said, “perception is reality.” And the reality is that, in a small magnitude, people subconsciously ignore news that is not in sync with their sense of trust.

 My survey further probes the respondent’s views of the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board by their rating of the government’s handling of Boeing 737Max crashes. The responses are a classical bell-shaped normal distribution centered on the neutral view. The respondents with strongly positive and strongly negative thoughts of the government are the minorities of less than 5 percent. It is surprising to me that the American consumer is more tenacious than I speculate. The heartiness is delightful and enlightening. The heartiness shines when the respondent that comments, “I have watched the Boeing documentary in Netflex…,” checks the positive approval rating of 3 in question eight on federal agency FAA and NTSB. This respondent knows more about the horrific accident than any other respondent, but he or she is unfazed by their sheer common sense that flight accidents are infrequent and remote. Perception is reality. The reality is that a person can vividly recall the horror of a crash in writing. But the vivid perception doesn’t carry over to dictate further actions to express dissatisfaction with the government. There is room to wiggle between perception and action. Humans are sophisticated beings.

 To clarify rational thoughts from perceptions, it may help to review the history of the safety of Boeing 737 in three focus points, the aviation culture of the 1990s, the incremental safety improvements of the 2000s, and the recent crises. The gap in knowledge brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic can be both technical and perceptional. On the technical side, the storage of commercial jets in desert conditions for a year was unprecedented. Former NTSB lead investigator Greg Feith commented that draining all hydraulic fluid for storage was not an established procedure - every airline could have its policy (youtube.com, 2020). And the former NTSB lead investigator went as far as saying that when accidents happen with deficient maintenance procedures when the stored planes take to the sky, it is not mechanical failure but human error. On the perceptional side of the knowledge gap, remote work and the furlough of pilots dull the reactions of working professions. But perception can be trained and altered. The Greek philosopher Socrates proclaimed that he was a descendant of the engineer Daedalus and engineering the ideal city-state of Kallipolis required the well-being of the soul. In Socrates’ words, in a just country, the people are confident in themselves and trust their government. In modern-day America, knowledge gives confidence to the people. The latest legal hurdle and delays on Boeing 737Max’s re-certification can manifest the people's faith. Legal maneuvering in the US can be prolonged and tedious at times. The American people pace briskly but do not appear hurried. 

Works Cited

737 MAX SOFTWARE UPDATE. (n.d.). boeing.com. Retrieved October 26, 2022, from https://www.boeing.com/commercial/737max/737-max-software-updates.page

Adair, Bill, Times Washington Bureau Chief. “This Bureaucrat May Have Saved Your Life.” Tampa Bay Times, 31 Aug. 2019, tampabay.com/news/perspective/this-bureaucrat-may-have-saved-your-life/1232275.

Adair, Bill. The Mystery of Flight 427: Inside a Crash Investigation. Illustrated, Smithsonian Books, 2004.

 “As Air Travel Rebounds, Boeing Forecasts Demand for More than 41,000 New Airplanes by 2041; International Traffic Gains Momentum as Restrictions Ease; Many Domestic Markets Nearly or Fully Recovered from Pandemic Impact; Over the next 20 Years, Airplane.” ENP Newswire, 18 July 2022. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsggo&AN=edsgcl.710623208&site=eds-live.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Internet Explorer". Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 Jul. 2022, www.britannica.com/technology/Internet-Explorer. Accessed 31 October 2022.

“CBS ‘Early Show’ Interview With NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman Subject: Alaska Plane Crash Interviewer: Harry Smith Time: 7:04 A.M. Edt Date: Wednesday, August 11, 2010 (Part 1).” Transcript Wire Service, Aug. 2010. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgin&AN=edsgcl.234414010&site=eds-live.

Durbin, Fran. “May Air Sales Increase by 12% over Last Year; Volume Approaches Four-Week Record Set in 1990.” Travel Weekly, vol. v51, no. n49, June 1992, p. p1. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsric&AN=edsric.A12275512&site=eds-live.

Fabey, Michael. “Boeing Not Feeling the Pressure.(THE AIRLINE BEAT)(Depressurization Problems of Boeing Co.’s 737s).” Travel Weekly, vol. 69, no. 16, Apr. 2010, p. 37. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsric&AN=edsric.A226816787&site=eds-live.

"First Female Pilot At A Major Airline, Emily Howell Warner, Flies West." Plane&Pilot, Plane&Pilot, July 2020, www.planeandpilotmag.com/news/the-latest/2020/07/07/first-female-pilot-at-a-major-airline-emily-howell-warner-flies-west. Accessed 31 Oct. 2022.

"H.R.2440 - 103rd Congress (1993-1994): Independent Safety Board Act Amendments of 1994." Congress.gov, Library of Congress, 25 October 1994, http://www.congress.gov/.

King, R. (2022, October 12). Boeing 737 MAX Could Be Grounded Again. MSN. https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/boeing-737-max-could-be-grounded-again/ar-AA12T2H6?ocid=wispr&li=BBnb7Kz

Mathai, R. J. S. (2013, July 12). The Face of the NTSB: Deborah Hersman. NBC Bay Area. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/the-interview-with-ntsb-chairman-deborah-hersman/1948955/

“Most Airplane Crashes Caused by Human Error.” Quality Progress, vol. 39, no. 11, Nov. 2006, p. 12. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edb&AN=23040934&site=eds-live.

“NTSB’s Aviation Safety Office Director Retires.” OH&S, 1 June 2012, ohsonline.com/articles/2012/06/01/ntsb-aviation-safety-office-director-retires.aspx.

Selinger, Marc. “Boeing CEO Muilenberg Loses the Chairman’s Role to Focus on Troubled 737 MAX Issues.” Jane’s Defence Weekly, vol. 56, no. 43, Oct. 2019, p. 20. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edo&AN=139420049&site=eds-live.

Smith, Helena. “The Strange Fate of Flight ZU522.” New Statesman, vol. 134, no. 4755, Aug. 2005, p. 16. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=18014960&site=eds-live.

Sverdlik, Yevgeniy. “Fire at Amazon Data Center Construction Site in Ashburn Contained.” DataCenter Knowledge, 9 Jan. 2015, www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/01/09/fire-amazon-data-center-construction-site-ashburn-contained.

“Tom Haueter Biography.” IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/nm5038276/bio. Accessed 12 Oct. 2022.

“Twenty Years of GPS and Instrument Flight.” Smithsonian, 25 Feb. 2014, timeandnavigation.si.edu/research/twenty-years-of-gps-and-instrument-flight.

“Why The Boeing 737 Max Is Flying Again.” YouTube, uploaded by CNBC News, 8 Dec. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE6rQxo7HUY.

Epilogue

I have changed my own view about what this paper is about since I started writing it. At first, I believed I had struck gold in finding a topic that fit my personality and the holiday season, which involves air travel as an American tradition. I believed I could find a single thesis, a lesson for all engineers to follow as a principle of ethics to conduct professional work with single-minded honesty. My dream quickly shattered when I found the technical difficulty in convincing readers that a single human flaw was to blame for all the crashes of the Boeing 737 Max. The technical difficulty is the limitation of engineering equations because, to this day, I can not find a thermodynamic equation that points to the design flaw of the 737 tail rudder servo that took down more than 400 American lives from 1991 to 1994. This straightforward equation likely does not exist because no Boeing engineer, with countless PhDs on its staff, ever comes forward as a “whistleblower” to corrupt design conduct. And, in the end, no Boeing CEO or engineer is ever incarcerated for such supposed misconduct.

Many industries have whistleblowers, and many other student researchers write about long incarcerations as the fallout. It would be very exciting to report about a whistleblower, but the reality of air travel engineering is not about sensationalization to win a popularity contest. I changed from aiming at the logos writing style to pathos and settled with the ethos writing style. I learned to appreciate federal workers' work ethics.

I am very grateful for the enthusiastic responses from the survey takers, especially the open-ending question about sharing their personal views about flight safety in the US. On average, each respondent wrote 20 words to me, a complete stranger, while studying in the school’s library and preparing for their exams. It is very encouraging that people care. 

But my biggest change of heart is the shift of focus from engineering toward human perceptions psychology. Over the course of the semester, I revisited my class notes on Psychology 101 and rediscovered the peer pressure effect on behavior and how facial expressions predict social interaction outcomes. I changed the title of my paper to reflect my thoughts in the middle of the semester. I changed my focus points. I see the researchers correctly point out that peer pressure dictates an English speaker’s accent and yet leaves a person’s career choice completely up to the person’s family ties and sociological values. True researchers can pinpoint the boundary of peer pressure, but I can hardly see where the boundary of a person’s perception influences his/her behavior. I can only say that further research is required to understand American consumer behavior. This isn’t the end of this research…