Originally Posted by
krismiler
The MCAS is supposed to activate and lower the nose if the pitch becomes excessive, it's hardly headline news when a system like this does what it's supposed to do. If the stall warning activates then it's notifiable and an investigation will be undertaken to determine how the aircraft got onto that situation in the first place.
The pilots couldn't be expected to report on the activation of something that they didn't know was installed in the first place. Flight data monitoring may have picked it up similar to how it would record an unstable approach or a limit being exceeded.
Did he mean to say that there had been previous incidents where the MCAS had malfunctioned in a similar way to the two disasters but the pilots had managed to prevent an accident ?
krismiler,
You have got it right.
The reports in AW&ST (in the bodies of technical articles, not headline news) were in the context of occurrences that were logged for maintenance to look at, but were only realised to be possibly MCAS related in retrospect.
They have come to light during the MAX investigation.
Tootle pip!!