Originally Posted by
cedric
Interesting to see the different approaches taken by the major North American carriers.
I summarized the data in the AC forum, but it's worth reposting here.
AC & AA - purchased both options
Southwest - purchased disagree alert & separately installed AOA sensors.
WestJet - only disagree alert. No AOA sensors.
UA - did not select either 
From the linked article above:
Yikes. That's not a good narrative. The Lion Air & Ethiopian pilots also used other data to fly their plane. What else did UA skimp out on? Nice to see AA taking a lead in safety, in this instance.
Originally Posted by
flyingeph12
No.
But then again, are the AoA sensors and disagree alert "safety options"? If they are, then it seems really bad to me that Boeing would sell those as options instead of including them as standard. Then again, apparently Boeing sells add-ons like extra rafts and fire extinguishers, so... (To be clear, I would be interested in what Airbus does as well, which the NYT article conveniently leaves out.)
In any event, all I was trying to convey is that any credit (or blame) for "add-ons" for the 7M8 may be more appropriately placed on prior management instead of the current one.
Why are there so many choices for such a critical system? Shouldn't functionally every 7M8 be the same as the next one off the line, especially in core flying functions?
Originally Posted by
cova
All this aside (with options, training, etc) - but the net is - why does the 7M8 need MCAS in the first place? To compensate for design issues. Older 738's don't have MCAS and don't crash like the LyonAir and ET planes. One of these options is just an alert.
So you are flying a new aircraft that is suppose to fly automatically, but you really need 3 well trained pilots to fly the plane so if a problem arises they can switch to manual, and use their skills to recover from a stall or dive.
This is what I've been saying all along. The 7M8 has a design flaw (or limitation, if you want to call it that). MCAS is a bandaid onto a major problem. The effectiveness of that bandaid is currently up for debate, and not trending in the right direction.