Originally Posted by
skybluesea
take-away = Lion Air pilot error for departure with sensors indicate negative angle of attack while on the ground. MCAS fault only appeared because failure to abort flight. Ultimately, system failure that aircraft design flaw only one aspect.
But so what? Boeing had not told anyone about the MCAS at that point, so they had no reason to be concerned with whatever the AOA sensors might do to the MCAS. I stick to my point:
- 1. There should not have been an MCAS in the first place, but a tail that was able to do its job properly.
- 2. To make things worse the MCAS was so poorly designed that it was an accidewnt waiting to happen. It almost loos like engineers at Boeing being pissed off by having been overruled by management, consciously or unconsciously, did their best to make the MCAS into a disaster. Having the thing depend upon one and only one notoriously unreliable primary sensor (these, including pitot, are invariably the weakest link in computer-based controls) was borderline criminal, the remedy (or more accurately the symptom relief stuff) being worse than the disease.
- 3. So fixing the MCAS as it stands may lower risks of accident by a factor ten or so, from the current rate of one every three months (admittedly a conservative estimate). But even then, the Max is still going to be less safe than for instance first generation 320s. Way worse than the public, and the aviation world, his expecting today. I sure home there will be some certification authority with the cloud and the guts to force Boeing to redesign the tails, and retrofit, even if that places them on the verge of bankruptcy. But no, I don't hold my breath. Then maybe a continued sequence of crash will end up with the same result, unfortunately?