Originally Posted by
gums
Salute!
Good friggin' grief!!
Back to the BBQ now.
Gums.....
Gums I always read your posts with great interest because you are far more knowledgeable than I, and many others here, about airplanes. I’m just a lowly Commercial SEL/IR with a thousand hours who quit flying myself around in 1993.
On the the other hand, I know a lot about marketing, risk assessment, and the lengths to which management will go to sell a buyer on the reliability of a system, while at the same time the engineers are telling them their expectations are impossible to meet. The world is full of examples of this phenomenon. Challenger, Columbia, and the FIU bridge collapse being just a few.
The MBAs are rarely able assess risk and come up with all sorts of clever vocabulary to hide it. I’m a Boeing shareholder and have faith in the long term future of the company. Short-term they have blown it big time. Their reluctance to ground the fleet even after it had essentially self-grounded worldwide is clear evidence of management in denial. I suspect that internally the engineers were waving red flags for a long time.
None of us know what was discussed at Boeing, but we do know that control forces became increasingly light as AoA increased, possibly to the point of needing an augmentation system to help the pilot push the nose down.
To me, MCAS was designed to prevent situations which might lead to a stall. As such public perception is going to stay “stall prevention”. A plane requiring a stall prevention system will scare the public. A system augmenting pilot control is an easy sell, like power steering.