Who knows? Well, the one paying and the one getting paid know for sure. Now, if you have information that shows otherwise please don’t be shy.

Regardless of who performed the coding, the issue was with whoever wrote the parameters and established the specifications. That was certainly Boeing senior employees.

I don't want to be disagreeable on this, but it's more complex than that. I'm pretty sure that the "happy path" criteria was met (meaning, everyday scenarios, some outliers were covered), but edge cases were probably missed with less qualified coding staff. There is a reason why companies still, and will continue to pay, top dollar for highly skilled software engineers, especially for mission critical applications. These "coders" have the propensity to work with their product management counterparts to fully understand their project end-to-end, and often raise areas of concern in a continuous, collaborative effort, to address them.

This does not mean they are necessarily US, European based as some might falsely presume, just that they are senior, experienced professionals in their field that ask appropriate questions, and are not just "order takers". I've have had the pleasure to work with such individuals from all parts of the world.

Juan Browne, an AA pilot certified on A320 and B737 aircraft and known for his “blancolirio” Youtube videos and Facebook page, has a very good (IMO) video explaining the entire MAX issue. The video is not a studio-based one, so it isn’t as polished as it might be, and it’s a longer one because it is extensive in its coverage. Juan, as a professional airman, explains the origins of MAX, the purpose of MCAS, destroys the shibboleths including the “unstable aircraft” and “requires computers to fly stably” tropes and brings us up to date through the end of August.

And a book length article on the crashes by the NYT:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...cid=spartanntp

I find it hard to see any good reason to believe any of these stories – they seem very designed to point blame in any direction other than one where there are deep pockets. The NYT article seems especially dodgy to me since blaming airmanship is an unhelpful analysis and suggests to me (always) a rug corner being lifted up to sweep something under.

Even if airmanship was a contributing factor, the appropriate analysis should be looking at what could be done to avoid further cases of stunningly poor airmanship.

The Kegworth crash, over 30 years ago, is very instructive here as the pilots survived and lost their jobs, due to being blamed for poor airmanship (they turned off the good engine, not the faulty one). But when it turned out that they had had no training in some key differences between the 737-300 and the 737-400, it became clear that the crash was a failure of design, not of poor pilots. (For those not familiar with the story, they had almost no data in the cockpit to identify the faulty engine and turning off the good engine also turned off other systems that made the fault in the other engine go away - so it seemed like they had done the right thing - but when they needed extra thrust to land the faulty engine failed completely. This is the crash where passengers knew which engine was faulty but said nothing when the pilots announced which engine they had shut down.)

I have read the full NYT article too and found it a very insulting exercise in pointing blame to the deceased.

The crews may not have had perfect airmanship indeed but - as a passenger - I do not want to fly in airplanes that only exceptional airmen can fly. I want to fly in airplanes that are safe to fly by any average pilot.

I actually learned a lot so thanks for posting that ...but damn, I hope he’s a much better pilot than YouTube Yapper because he’s almost unwatchable and could have edited it down to about 5 minutes.

Indeed this article seems to blame mostly everybody else and make excuses for Boeing...Even though he explains many of the shortcomings and problems with MCAS and Boeing, he is not firm enough and he keeps getting back to blaming the victims...The whole contextualization of the article is biased that way...

You could tell the ending before halfway through.

Yes, the way the pilots reacted and ground crew handled did contribute to the "holes lining up in the swiss cheese", but one of the first couple of holes was caused by MCAS.

Indeed, without MCAS, this thread would not exist.

Undoubtedly. He’s a pilot, not a presenter.

IMO, it’s not the imperfectly designed MCAS but rather Boeing’s decision to soft-soap MCAS by not disclosing it to any extent to regulators, airlines or airmen. And Boeing’s false costing of the aircraft by offering two fairly important safety features as extra paid options.

Senor JDiver, no, I cannot agree. Primero de todo the MCAS system is a flawed and risky solution to a perceived marketing/sales problem and not a good engineering or flight envelope maintenance system.

Proximo... I think the expression "soft-soap" is not adequate to describe Boeing's wilful lack of disclosure of the existence, characteristics and effects of this MCAS system. I am most concerned when manufacturers deliberately occlude the system to the degree that Boeing has clearly done. I am disturbed when knowledgeable people such as you use such terminology to downplay the deep obscuring of this system from operators and pilots.

Also for me a most disturbing part of this sorry story was Boeing's CEO fails to acknowledge risk or danger following the Lionair crash in Octubre 2018. It took another terrible fatal crash to prompt the self-examination and internal product scrutiny that should happen instantly in a professional airframe manufacturing company following a fatal crash.

It is very sad to me that Boeing's management has decayed ethically after the previous engineers and managers for many decades designed such great planes as the 727, 747 and 777. I have misgivings about the MAX series. I have flown several million millas and much on 737s and all safely and confidently. Pero no mas.

Boeing are wrong if it believes this problem is "business as usual" and that this will "go away." There was customer aversion to the DC10 in the early 1980s but I think, this is worse.

No doubt the tragedies will take some time to overcome but with just two truly global players for plane types of that size and larger it's not going to sink Boeing.

The flying public has a short memory and even shallower pocketbooks. Now flygskam, that's another story...

Boeing's CEO is on Capitol Hill today and tomorrow fielding questions from Congress about the Max.