Originally Posted by
GlobalNav
Perhaps so, but if it was designed to keep fighting the pilot who was desperately trying to regain control of the airplane, then it was designed wrong. Certainly the MCAS did not malfunction, it behaved as designed, but when it apparently received the wrong AoA value from the single input and the pilot(s) desperately sought to recover the airplane, the MCAS behaved badly, unsafely and unacceptably. It was designed wrong.
Agree with that. The post that you've quoted is referring to faulty sensor input as an unpredictable condition, coming from an extraneous device, which clearly is not the case. The entire airplane control system - the entire cockpit must be designed to maintain safety and facilitate pilot's efforts under any conceivable situation. I think that designing MCAS to trim down so aggressively is wrong on multiple levels, the first of course is that it has proved able to win over the desperate efforts the pilot(s) to keep the plane from falling, and the second is that its continued action created an uninterrupted emergency situation drawing away all attention and cold thinking needed to perform a not-so-obvious action - its disconnection.
Now, how many documented occurrences of MCAS acting for what it has been designed do we have?