Originally Posted by
OldnGrounded
I thought, when I first read it in the JATR report, that the recommendation to test the bare airframe was an indication that the Joint Authorities team has serious doubts about the MAX's stability in certain corners of the envelope. Reading it a couple more times hasn't changed the impression -- that was a very striking recommendation to include.
And, really, as ktcanuck says, MCAS is a sledgehammer solution for a rather delicate problem, if the problem really is stick force gradient.
The kicker to this is that Boeing engineers found that their original implementation (presumably not based on guesswork) was markedly insufficient to meet the need they had identified. Therefore a naive person might imagine that the 'delicate problem' as originally scoped turned out to be much more indelicate on the final airframe.
It is therefore unsurprising that certifying authorities would/should want to know what might be happen, and how air crew should respond, in the event of MCAS Fail Off