"Boeing has said the MAX, with its revised MCAS, will be among the safest airplanes ever to fly"
Nice rhetoric from Boeing but perhaps they mean to say "among the the safest MCAS airplanes ever to fly"? Quite likely it would be very safe if it had no MCAS at all, with the drawback it wouldn't be certifiable..
Why they didn't implement the MCAS safeguards on the MAX they did on the military aeroplane is a question possibly the accountants in Chicago can answer. Especially considering the enormous revenue the MAX was going to generate. Alternatively, they could have tried designing a state of the art aircraft in the first place.
"Boeing instead relied primarily on pilots as the backstop should that plane’s MCAS misfire. MAX engineers determined pilots would quickly identify an MCAS misfire as an emergency known as a “runaway stabilizer,” then counteract the system with a longstanding cockpit procedure."
Really? Expecting line pilots to troubleshoot a malfunctioning system they didn't know existed (Lion) in a critical flight phase? (and not deactivated by control column inputs a la Tanker version).
Since when did airline pilots have double duty as Boeing test pilots?
Lawyers will be busy for years...