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.
By my understanding that's a bit of a simplification... and most T tailed aircraft tend to have that characteristic, as with the Comet and fatigue, the 1-11 just happened to be the first to fly in that regime.