Originally Posted by
SteinarN
Interesting read from The Seattle Times article.
The original Boeing document provided to the FAA included a description specifying a limit to how much the system could move the horizontal tail — a limit of 0.6 degrees, out of a physical maximum of just less than 5 degrees of nose-down movement. That limit was later increased after flight tests showed that a more powerful movement of the tail was required to avert a high-speed stall, when the plane is in danger of losing lift and spiraling down.The behavior of a plane in a high angle-of-attack stall is difficult to model in advance purely by analysis and so, as test pilots work through stall-recovery routines during flight tests on a new airplane, it’s not uncommon to tweak the control software to refine the jet’s performance.
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Lion air's FDR show that the trim was moved to full of the available 7 notches (it's not clear how those translate to degrees). They would certainly still be alive if there as a limit. They kept it in air at ~ 3 notches. If max needs more to get out of stall, perhaps it does need a larger hstab/eleveator instead of a hacked together software?
Or perhaps the key really is the reset. Does mcas reset with each trim input and takes the current position as the new neutral? If AoA vane is sending wrong data it's easy to see how this would result in a runaway trim.
This
image shows the difference between a 737-800 (yellow) and MAX (magenta). Notice the bigger nacelles and same hstab size.
Originally Posted by
SteinarN
After reading the Seattle Times article I am left with a feeling that the Max has very undesirable stall characteristics, seen by the need to increase the MCAS limits from the intended and modest 0.6 degrees to the large 2.5 degrees.
I thought 0.6 was a hard limit... e.g, we move this much and then it's up to the pilot. If it was 0.6 every 5 seconds it's still bad, but at least easier to manage.