I am surprised that other regulators haven’t acted more quickly. This is supposed to be a safety first industry and the responsibity should now be on Boeing to prove their aircraft is safe. Not for the investigators to prove it isn’t. On the face of intial reports, these seem eerily similar events. If this is MCAS related then;
If I understand the MCAS logic correctly, it relies on only one set of AoA instrumentation and does not fail safely? If a system critical to the continued safe operation of the aircraft does not fail safe, then IMO, it is unsafe and should not have been certified.
That is very black and white, I am not a pilot, just an interested bystander. But, people are losing their lives over what appears a poorly designed system. Blaming pilots for not following the manual is a cyncial get out of jail free card. Address the root cause which by all accounts to date is a flawed MCAS implementation. If an MCAS issue happens at altitude, it affords flight crew time to react. When altitude is limited as has been the case in Lion and Ethiopian cases, it could be that there just isn’t enough time to diagnose and save the day.
Remember the US Airways into the Hudson, investigators were about to blame the flight crew for not returning to an airfield. They even had sim sessions to prove the aircraft could have made Teterboro. What those sim sessions did not account for was thinking time, the extra 30 seconds delay added befoe the sim pilots were allowed to head for Teterboro was enough to cause them to be unable to make it. It’s all well and good having a procedure to disable MCAS but MCAS would need to be identied as the issue before switching it
off. At low altitudes, how much time does that give the crew before they are doomed?
I’ve read elsewhere that SWA have installed additional AoA instrumentation on their MAX’s to help pilots in a situation where MCAS decides a nose first dive is an appropriate course of action. That seems enough evidence to me to conclude that SWA see the threat worthy of at least some additional protection to help their pilots in a scenario where MCAS decides an aircraft is in danger of stalling, when infact it isn’t.