from seattle times
If the final safety analysis document was updated in parts, it certainly still contained the 0.6 limit in some places and the update was not widely communicated within the FAA technical evaluation team.“None of the engineers were aware of a higher limit,” said a second current FAA engineer.The discrepancy over this number is magnified by another element in the System Safety Analysis: The limit of the system’s authority to move the tail applies each time MCAS is triggered. And it can be triggered multiple times, as it was on the Lion Air flight.One current FAA safety engineer said that every time the pilots on the Lion Air flight reset the switches on their control columns to pull the nose back up, MCAS would have kicked in again and “allowed new increments of 2.5 degrees.” “So once they pushed a couple of times, they were at full stop,” meaning at the full extent of the tail swivel, he said.Peter Lemme, a former Boeing flight controls engineer who is now an avionics and satellite-communications consultant, said that because MCAS reset each time it was used, “it effectively has unlimited authority.”