Originally Posted by
silverstrata
The broken part was a MCAS system that reacted to a single faulty input - instead of comparing that input with its partner; deciding there was a discrepancy; and switching itself off.
On second thoughts, the real broken parts were the designers and engineers who thought that MCAS was a good idea. It looks to me like a case of group confirmation bias, were a small cabal decide upon an action, and they have sufficient authority that nobody else will question their wisdom. As someone said above, flight crews have to do CRM every year, so do Boeing engineers do DRM or ERM every year? (design or engineering resource management)
Silver
Originally Posted by
acad_l
True. But the Airbus planes are stable throughout their flying envelope. The Max alas is not. The FAA should have never allowed a software fix as a remedy for a basic design flaw. And there must have been engineers at Boeing who were very upset of having been overruled by bean counters and MBA types. Admittedly the MCAS as it is today is a remedy (to the symptoms) worse than the disease. But there should never have been an MCAS in the first place, the right thing to do was to redesign the horizontal stabilizer.
Only airliner I can think of that turned out to have a stability issue was the BAC-111. But that was found late in the game, not by design, and the remedy apparently worked.
Don't get me wrong, I totally agree. The 737 should stop at 150 people and 3 hours, (if B wants a bigger plane start building the 757NG.) If you have stretched your plane so far you need an extra telescoping landing gear and higher speeds to prevent a tailstrike, and software trimming because of inherent instability you are doing something wrong. If you implement said band-aid with a single source input and call it a day, you are well on your way to criminal negligence. MCAS should never have been designed, build or approved this way, my post was just a reply to someone who was more scared of software than hardware, and I disagreed with his POV.