Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing engineer who worked on designing the interfaces on the MAX’s flight deck, said managers mandated that any differences from the previous 737 had to be small enough that they wouldn’t trigger the need for pilots to undergo new simulator training.
That left the team working on an old architecture and layers of different design philosophies that had piled on over the years, all to serve an international pilot community that was increasingly expecting automation.
“It’s become such a kludge, that we started to speculate and wonder whether it was safe to do the MAX,” Ludtke said.
Ludtke didn’t work directly on the MCAS, but he worked with those who did. He said that if the group had built the MCAS in a way that would depend on two sensors, and would shut the system off if one fails, he thinks the company would have needed to install an alert in the cockpit to make the pilots aware that the safety system was off.And if that happens, Ludtke said, the pilots would potentially need training on the new alert and the underlying system. That could mean simulator time, which was off the table.
“The decision path they made with MCAS is probably the wrong one,” Ludtke said. “It shows how the airplane is a bridge too far.”
seattle times: a-lack-of-redundancies-on-737-max-system-has-baffled-even-those-who-worked-on-the-jet