Originally Posted by
devans999
There is nothing unstable about the plane at all. The only problem is it flew a bit DIFFERENTLY than the NG, in a very few corner cases. They wanted to keep the flying characteristics the same as NG in all cases, so pilots wouldn't have to get a new type certificate. That's it. If they had gone the route of needing pilots to do a full training on it, they wouldn't have needed MCAS at all. In their pursuit to make it "feel" like the pilots were flying an NG, they screwed up the MCAS. The plane would be perfectly fine if they disabled mcas, but nobody would buy it because they'd have to get an entire roster of max only pilots.
THIS THIS THIS
The best solution to the "problem" was for Boeing to disable MCAS and throw compensation at their customers to pay for retraining to fly the MAX. But because the FAA got caught out for missing the major issues with the MCAS system, they now have to subject Boeing to sufficient mortification and penance (in the form of correcting MCAS and all the knock-on effects of that) to convince other regulators and the flying public that things are "fixed." On top of that, Southwest categorically rejected the straightforward fix because they didn't want to upset their spoiled pilot's union or invest in rudimentary crew scheduling software to accommodate more than one pilot group. Remember, Southwest retired the -300s not because they were EOL, but because the FAA refused to let pilots hold a rating for the Classic, NG, and MAX all at the same time. When the MAX grounding happened, they were squeezed for capacity, all because of the arrogance of their pilots union and the monomaniacal obsession with "One Fleet Type"