Originally Posted by
Thistle42
So surely in that case the bare without MCAS test has already been done when they discovered that effect? And anyway, by now after several months of grounding, someone somewhere must have confirmed the MAX without MCAS enabled so the problem is known but does not have a simple solution.
JATR recommendation was "The FAA should review the natural (bare airframe) stalling characteristics" - note that they didn't say "the FAA should do a bunch of new flight tests".
My take on it is that JATR didn't actually have the bare airframe test results to review, but they presume FAA has the data or can get it from Boeing. The purpose of the review is to ascertain whether MCAS is actually a stall-id system (which a stick pusher is, I think?) under the regs, which opens up another can of worms as to whether MCAS meets the regs. a for stall-id system.