A nuance that I have not seen stated here previously, one well worth considering as people go back and forth arguing over whether or not the pilots should have saved the day:
MCAS introduced a single point of failure that without pilot intervention in a highly specific way results 100 percent of the time in the aircraft flying itself into the ground. Either the pilot nails the answer to the question while all hell is breaking loose and g-loads are all over the place (about a system which they had no awareness existed), and they do it within a very very short period of time, or the airplane will 100 percent fly itself into the ground. Straight into the ground BTW.
I cannot recall any other instance of a single point of failure system or sensor (or any system for that matter) on a commercial airplane which places the airplane in a state where the only chance for survival is a single action by the pilot, without which the airplane will crash. Once the AOA failed in Indonesia the airplane was essentially trying to fly itself into the ground. The Capt. kept that from happening for a bit, then it succeeded when he handed the airplane to the FO to grab the book and look for an answer that was not in fact there.
I can recall tons of technical issues that resulted in incidents and accidents, in fact I’ve survived a few on my own, but none where the failure of a single sensor meant that a perfectly good airplane was literally trying to kill everyone on board.
We can go round and round about whether or not the flight crew should have been able to aviate their way out of the circumstance they found themselves in, but if the penalty for failure to act quickly enough and perfectly enough on any given in-flight issue on a single sensor and a system about which you knew nothing was immediate death for you and your passengers would you still choose to fly?? Are you that certain of your perfection in the air??
If you knew that there might be a system on your airplane that you knew nothing about and that had the power to command the airplane to try to kill you, would you fly in that airplane, or god forbid take command of it with a couple hundred people in your care??
That is exactly what Boeing did to every MAX crew that flew the airplane. And whether with ill-intent or not they did it knowingly and deliberately. We don’t know them now, but Boeing is filled with smart people. Someone(s) knew exactly what Boeing was doing putting MCAS into service in the clandestine way they did, and I presume it was done that way for an (as yet unknown) reason. Those people will speak up at some point, or I hope they will anyway because it was no accident that MCAS anonymously arrived in the MAX without flight crews being made aware of its presence.
We can argue that the Lion Air crews who successfully survived an otherwise fatal experience should have alerted the airline, and we can argue a ton of other things too.
What we cannot argue, for one moment, is that the regulatory system that allowed Boeing to self-certify safety of the 737 MAX functioned as intended.
What we cannot argue is that Boeing and the regulatory system produced a safe airplane.
Quite to the contrary they produced an airplane that with the right type of single sensor failure would immediately try to kill everyone on board, with only the immediate and correct intervention of the pilots, who had no idea that the system trying to kill them even existed, to prevent that outcome.
The surprising thing isn’t that it happened, it’s that it took so long to happen.
Regards-
dce