Originally Posted by
CurtainTwitcher
My intuitive "feel" on this is the crews faced very complex scenarios that they were untrained for, and this contributed to the two MAX accidents.
However, the raw data of the accident rates suggests that the 737-NG operation globally is remarkable immune to a catastrophic outcome bases on the exact AoA failures, the consequent cacophony of warnings and noise, even though they share the same sensors and architecture with the sole exception of the MCAS system. As far as I am aware, there have been no hull losses due to flight control issues for the NG.
Globally, NG crews have dealt with these failure modes and landed the aircraft safely in 22 years and 100+ million flights.
The final accident report mentions that there have been 16 known cases of inadvertent stick shaker activations on the 737NG fleet. It does not detail the underlying cause of these activations. All but two of these events resulted in an immediate return to the departure airport. I have seen second-hand reports of two of these incidents. In both cases, the crews were VMC and got the stick shaker on takeoff. The bad side was quickly identified, control was transferred as appropriate, followed by a quick trip around the pattern. The Airspeed Unreliable NNC was not performed in either of these two cases. So yes, this can be a relatively benign malfunction on the 737NG in VMC without any other complicating factors.
That said, throw in some IMC, high terrain and/or other complications, then this can develop into a fairly challenging malfunction. Keep in mind that one of the potential causes of an Airspeed Unreliable event could be a multiple bird strike during takeoff in which the crew could be dealing with more than a single sensor failure.