Originally Posted by
justinbrett
If this is indeed the cause, there is still some pilot error involved for putting the aircraft into a stall position. I'm also unaware that while the failsafe might be a good idea, it is not essential for flying (indeed Boeing have said it may be turned off inflight, but training on how to do this wasn't included in the max conversion).
At least in the case of the Lion Air crash, the current theory is that the angle of attack sensor was giving an erroneous signal and the plane was not in fact at risk of stalling, but MCAS was pushing the nose down anyway due to the bad sensor reading.