Originally Posted by
dinbangkok
Regardless of whether you're a pilot or not, surely the question that needs to be answered is simple: How is it remotely OK for Boeing (or any other manufacturer), to sell a passenger aircraft that needs software to correct an aerodynamic imbalance in the design of the aircraft (prone to pitching up)?
I was trained to fly over 50 years ago. That involved the Trident. It had a yaw damper - a computer system to counter the basic instability of the aeroplane. Aircraft that require computers are nothing new.
Several people have implied it's perfectly OK for fighters to be unstable but not airliners. I simply can't see the logic in this.
The ironic thing is Airbus take the opposite view - for the most part they take the model that the computers should be involved in all manoeuvring actions. As we know, a similar clash between computers and pilots on an A320 ( XL888T) caused a crash but everybody seems to accuse Boeing of inventing this kind of scenario.
It's a curious situation. There are lots of dodgy things about the Lion crash. The Ethiopian event has not yet - to my knowledge - been definitely attributed to an MCAS malfunction. I think we can all agree it would have been better if pilots had briefed about the potential failure behaviour of MCAS but this might simply have been an oversight on the part of Boeing rather than something cynical.