L39 Guy and 737 Driver- I owe you both a reply form last night, but it will have to wait for a bit.
In getting caught up with the thread just now a number of continuations of the theme from teh past week popped up, some in support of your stated observation/opinions and some against. Instead of arguing about them ad infinatum I had a vision of explaining how we aren't necessarily as far apart as it may seem, but also how your view as stated is (IMHO) deeply flawed and unforgiving towards four people who are not here to defend themselves.
My path to enlightenment is actually very easy and short.
Assumption: MCAS is a bastard system (some would say a killer) that was created and installed at the last minute and that provides a stupid feel/feedback control with actual control over the entirety of the horizontal stabilizer's range of movement.
Statement 1: Many professional pilots feel strongly that the primary focus for responsibility (note I said primary, not sole) lies with the airmanship (or lack thereof) of the flight crews who perished. In a narrow window of time they failed to correctly (as in solve the puzzle) answer the challenge they had been presented with, the first time never getting there, the second not getting there until the stab was outside of a previously unknown box that would allow it to be manually rolled back into more usable territory. The follow-on to this statement is that both crashes were the fault of the crews for failing the most basic of tasks- to fly the airplane.
Statement 2: Many of us here feel that there is a deep and very real culpability within Boeing and the FAA for creating such a lethal design. In this case (this is all entirely hypothetical, please work with the suggestion rather than the actuality) an engineer was presented with a problem that needed to be solved. She and her team came up with MCAS. The person responsible for choosing the best course of design knew that MCAS would have a profound impact on the horizontal stab, and they chose to shoehorn it in there anyway. The flight-test crews knew of the system at least and failed to properly review it for (what are now) obvious technical and safety shortcomings. Then, in a further admission that they were pushing the envelope everyone involved at Boeing literally hid the existence of the system from the pilots and operators who would fly the airplane. That person(s) also misled the FAA by informing the feds that the maximum authority that MCAS would have was .6 of a degree, when in reality (and they knew this) it was 2.5 degrees at a whack. In a final insult they said "all you need is an hour with this here tablet-thingy and you will know all you need to know to safely command and fly the MAX series of aircraft!!
With those two statements on offer- and the acknowledgement that there is plenty of blame to go around, the question I have is why are you not focusing on Boeing, the corporate culture that created this monster, the profit-driven betrayal of everyone here, and the fact that they are clearly working to pull a rabbit out of the hat in lieu of actually starting over again- which is what any rational society would require them to do. Yes, we know who the four crew members are, so that makes them easy targets, but if the professionals on this forum are willing to eat their own while looking the other way as Boeing goes about its
PR campaign then what does that really say about all of us??
Warm regards-
dce