This past weekend, I met an engineer who works for Comac, and he told me to avoid their planes at all costs, as well as the 737-MAX.

While I suspect there may be something to that allegation, I am trying to be consistent in avoiding "friend of a friend said" (much less "acquaintance of an Internet chatter said") scuttlebutt. There used to be a saying, "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog". I don't think I've met any of the other posters on here (or if I have, I haven't known it) but most of those posting who claim to be aviation professional (pilots, FAs, etc.) do seem to have background knowledge consistent with those positions.

There is no doubt the 737MAX has flight characteristics that vary fom previous generations of the 737 -- I think that's the whole point of MCAS, to make it "feel" like other 737s when under manual control. OTOH, I have to question the posts that try to claim the aircraft is inherently unstable or that talk about 737 crashes as if they happened frequently (particularly WRT mainline airlines). Yes, there have been a number of 737 crashes over the past 50 years but it's one of the heaviest flown airframes in history. I'd like to see the crash statistics when normalized by number of flight hours or number of take-offs. I'd further like to see those stats when restricted to major airlines -- I seem to recall someone pointing out that ET has crashed 10% of their 737 fleet in the last decade?

Having read moondog's posts over the years in the China forum I would say he/she is a very knowledgeable poster.

I would hesitate to fly on Comas, MAX, probably OK once the fix is in.

And I would hope that by now ALL MAX pilots know about the two "secret" switches.

738 off Beiruit in 2010
734 in Accra in 2015
7M8 in ADD in 2019

Out of a fleet of just ~30 737 airframes.

This was a cargo aircraft.

I don't think the aircraft much cares what's inside the fuselage when fails to land normally. My point was that a disproportionate number of accidents with the 737, even pre-MAX, by number of airframes or by flight hours seems to come from the Third World which suggests there's something beyond the general airframe design at play. As with most things, this may well be a confluence of factors.

Perhaps, but when you meet an actual engineer who doesn't stand by his company's product, you tend to take note.

Here is another perspective on the whole China thing: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/ar...737-max-planes

That's not really accurate though. If we're opening this up to all 737s, then there are plenty of 737 accidents by non-third world operators. Heck at one point in the early 90s USAir was crashing a 737 every couple of years.

Every couple of years?!?

1989 - Incorrect rudder trim for takeoff caused abort and the aircraft overshot the runway, going into the water.
1991 - Aircraft cleared to land on a runway that had another aircraft waiting to takeoff, resulting in collision.
1994 - Aircraft lost control on approach at 6000 ft.

None of the other crashes listed at US Airways plane crashes involved 737s and 2 of the 3 above were definitely ascribed to human error.

Boeing 737 plane crashes lists 79 "significant events" (not all of which were crashes) for all models of the 737 from 1972 to ET. The vast majority involved Third World or second- (third-?) rate airlines.

Perhaps there's a better database for me to pull from?

Unfortunate that a system that was probably never expected to activate in normal flying had a hand in bringing down two planes (if that is how it pans out on the ET crash). But that perhaps also explains why MCAS seems to have had such a poor design -- maybe nobody thought it was important enough to put much thought into.

Seems like Boeing's software fixes to MCAS, coupled with the likely pilot awareness at this point, will be enough to avoid another accident based on MCAS. But I hope that in addition to curbing the effect of MCAS, they figure out the root cause of the AoA data problem. The chatter/speculation on PPRuNe seems reasonable to me that the culprit is likely not the AoA sensor itself but either the wiring or the processing associated with it.

What does the fact that the re-work seems to have run into difficulties and will take longer tell us? Are they just being more careful this time or it is not as easy as they said earlier or both?