So, is the United 737Max less safe than AA because it is lacking these safety features? Or is it really true that for UA it's not necessary because their pilots have other systems in place that would detect a malfunction, and would know what to do?
After reading the NYT article just now, I am also surprised that AA (the most penny-pinching airline in the US), would install all the safety features and UA would not.

Maybe they got discounts/ complimentary for the promise of a future large purchase? I am guessing it might be common in the airline market.

Back to the car analogy, do the pilots at UA have any say in which safety options are chosen?

Their union has a pretty loud voice on safety issues.

Everyone should read this post, as it (a) suggests that even on the "saved" lion Air flight the pilots got lucky, they did not diagnose the issue, and (b) the 737 pilot's response is very honest in admitting that these events don't just happen when everyone is quietly sitting listening to opera, and would be VERY hard to diagnose, let along fix, without a lot of elevation to work with. I will simply say what I have said several times upthread, in the 2010 LH A321 AoA trim issue, the pilots only managed to find/fix the issue because they had 30K to work with. Had they been at take-off, the results might well have been different. This just highlights how Boeing ought to - as part of a TS16949/DFMEA review - identify the issue, and have multiple redundancies to address it.

There is a lot of protective responses on this board that - they/us pilots, etc - would have easily diagnosed the problem. The hard truth is that a lot is going on, and diagnosing the problem on a 737 in particular, and then manually trying to fix the trim, appears to not be so easy.

A key point. Had this happened once, the "pilots should have figured it out" defense might work, but the hard truth is that two sets of pilots (one at a well respected airline, after getting Boeings "new" training, such as it was) did not figure out the issue in time. This is all on Boeing at the end of the day.

I'm going with a few extra cents into the value of each share of UAL, resulting in a few extra $$$ into the value of Jeff Smisik's stake in the airline...

Well then you would be guessing exactly what the Lion Air pilots were looking at, and freaked out about, as they tried to save the plane. So hopefully, UA was relying on more than that.....

Hind sight-bias works in two ways. Here, knowing the problem, one would immediately cut off the system and do the hard physical work of moving the trim (described above by a 737 pilot), but that does not suggest that the failure mode was so easy to determine, particularly right after take off, and for a NEW system that Boeing did not train folks on.

again, this is 100% on Boeing.

Based on the initial data reported by the CVR, the pilots were frantically scrambling (given the low altitude). Seems like something they did not encounter in sim training and were trying to solve it on the fly.

I haven't heard of a single four-door sedan ever killing 150 people in one fell swoop. @:-)

They should. If it enhances safety, especially in the critical phases of takeoff and/or landing, it ought to be mandatory on aircraft carrying hundreds of passengers.

Did someone tell United that the MCAS system only pays attention to one of two sensors and doesn't notice if their outputs don't match so that an indicator to the pilots is necessary?

Seems like the optional safety equipment is only really not optional because Boeing's system design sucks. A critical airline system reliant on ONE sensor?

Thought we learned our lesson after that Air France Airbus 330 broke up over the Atlantic because of Pitot tubes...

Never mind that cars kill people at a rate almost one thousand times higher than passenger aircraft, on a per passenger-mile basis.

Ya, not apples and oranges, apples and asteroids :rolleyes:

Let's stick to airplanes in this thread @:-)

Yes, however when I purchase a car with a lack of said features, that's my choice. If I purchase a car without seatbelts, crash, get ejected, and die, I was well aware of the risk when I set off and opted to go ahead with it.

Conversely, we are talking about a form of mass transportation here wherein customers trust that the company and the agencies which regulate it have done what is reasonable to ensure their safety. And what is coming to light is that Boeing and a number of airlines have not done that and instead decided to save money by not fitting what are basically essential features. The question must be asked, why did Boeing even make this an option?

No but there have been frequent auto accidents with 100% fatalities and there are still more people killed on the road than in airplanes every year. People have died because they weren't wearing their seatbelts but people have also died because of the way airbags triggered. Some of the people who died due to not wearing their seatbelts would still be alive anyway had they not been speeding/distracted/poorly trained/etc.

I am suspicious due to the confluence of circumstances but I'm going to disagree with those who emphatically state right now with the information presented on this board and through mainstream media sources that this is definitively 100% Boeing's fault. There's still a lot of information that we don't know yet.

Of course I mind that. I can walk and chew gum at the same time. @:-)

I certainly WON'T accept that 300 people dead in two crashes five months apart in the same brand new model of plane is somehow "acceptable losses."

I guarantee you that if 100 brand new 2020 Ford Unicorn cars suddenly ran into brick walls and killed their occupants on the same day, every single one of those cars would be impounded and not driven until Ford fixed the problem or took back the cars. That's the closest analogy we have between cars and planes, not the "hey, lots of people die in cars every day, so that makes plane crashes acceptable" ridiculous logic.