Boeing fundamentally changed with the McDonald-Douglas "merger" which was infact a stealth take-over of Boeing by the McDonald-Douglas management. They became much more focused on trying to get higher profit margins by milking existing programs, not doing cutting edge design, and also far more adept at working the refs and lobbying. I think you see both changes leading to where they are today. They did not do the investments they needed to, did a new design on the cheap, and then tried to use (or used) political pull to get the plane certified, and for a while hold off regulatory action. The Boeing's CEO was calling the President directly says about all you need to know.

You are correct, there are (or so has been reported, I have no first hand knowledge) two AoA sensors, but only the one on the nose was tied to the MCAS system. My guess is that Boeing is going to tie in the second one, and not add in a third one. Note again that Airbus had issue with the AoA sensors icing on the A320 (most recently on an LH plane that had issues going from Spain to MUC in 2015) and made changes in both the sensors and the software. So the problem was easy to anticipate. the difference was that on the LH flight (on an A321) the plane was at 30K feet when the problem occurred, so the pilots had space to recover.

It has been reported that the second sensor is an option and that both Lion air and Ethiopian did not pick up.

The option is for an AoA sensor disagree indicator. They all have two but not everyone would know if they are within a tolerance of each other.

You beat me to it. Boeing asked for more $$$ for the indicator. I saw that Lion Air did not order it, but have not seen anything re Ethiopian.

ET did not have it either.

An option...does not sound like a must have.

Profits vs lives.

However, in this case I personally put the onus on Boeing. If it is necessary it should not be an option. In both cases on this new plane it sounds as though it should have been mandatory and not a nice to have option.

Analogous to GM asking me if I want an airbag in my car - and if I do, which common sense dictates I should, I need to pay an additional line item charge. (Let's disregard that airbags are mandatory, it's just an example).

Who in their right mind would forgo an airbag when it appears to be such a critical safety requirement?

Can anyone answer this?

Someone who doesn't know that airbags are necessary, because GM advertised that the car works just fine without it?

Quite simply, the fight would not have been in vain if the pilots executed a procedure for which they had been trained.

The question, of course, is why were the pilots even in the position where their (correct) affirmative response was the only thing standing between survival and disaster? As we have maintained throughout this excellent thread, is that the two crashes appear to be the combination of a poorly-designed system that inexplicably did not incorporate the redundancy and fail-safe features of other, similar flight control augmentation systems, plus the final link in the causal chain... improper crew management of an emergency situation. Unfortunately, human factors always play a role.

Boeing has a major problem in that it appears to have designed a system that creates a dynamic situation where a crew's options dwindle much too quickly in the event of a single point of failure. That's not acceptable.

Reminiscent to the DC-10 and AA191. Only the captain's side of the aircraft had a stick shaker, on the FO's side it was an option... which hadn't been fitted.

Someone who has noted that airbags have been noted to cause fatalities rather than prevent them in otherwise survivable crashes for drivers meeting certain physical characteristics (which the purchaser happens to meet). ;-)

Sorry, I know you were striving for a particular point but there are no panaceas, including airbags. Corollary questions which people should be asking:

1. Under what conditions might MCAS or any other part of Boeing's (or Airbus's) design override or preempt the pilot's control of the aircraft?
2. Did those particular conditions prevail during the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes?
3. Was there a procedure available to reestablish pilot control of the aircraft?
   1. If so, were the pilots in question aware of this procedure?
   2. If not, why not?
   3. Is this procedure available to current pilots of these aircraft?
4. How often do the conditions outlined in question 2 occur?

It's very easy to jump on a bandwagon to accuse Boeing or unnamed FAA bureaucrats of malfeasance. I will note as I did before that selling aircraft isn't like selling coffee machines or clothing, one can't simply dismiss design or construction errors based on the inevitable march of statistics. I don't know a lot of people in either organization but those I do take aviation safety very seriously. It may not be the primary factor in their safety consciousness but they know catastrophes like these have an overwhelmingly negative effect on sales, profits, jobs, etc.

I haven't kept up with the machinations at each company and I'm not an aviation engineer so question for those who do or are: is it still true that Boeing generally builds aircraft where the avionics are designed to help the pilot while Airbus generally builds aircraft where the pilot is intended to help the avionics? If the allegations are true, it would seem the software design for the MAX adopted the Airbus philosophy over the traditional Boeing philosophy. That fundamental difference in design philosophy has led me to prefer Boeing over Airbus flights for quite a while, to heck with which aircraft has more modern IFE or seats or whatever.

That will be answered by the two accident investigations.

I have a lot of layovers in Central America. Often, our hotel transportation is a van that I've seen in many countries but never in the US. It has only lap belts in the passenger seats. Shoulder harnesses are only on the front two seats. It also has very little structure in front of the driver for a crumple zone; somewhat like the old VW microbus. Certainly "less safe" than what we have in the US but is it "unsafe"?

All 737s that I've ever seen have had two AoA vanes. Both on the nose; one on the left and one on the right. That data is used by the air-data computers. Some have AoA indicators on the primary flight display. Others don't. We don't have any procedures which utilize the AoA display. It, when installed, is just additional information.

Seems to me that Boeing and at least some at FAA were criminally negligent with design/certification of the 737 MAX - resulting in hundreds of people dead. It's bloody murder.