Originally Posted by
silverstrata
No, but if they discovered a discrepancy, they could turn the whole system off for the rest of the flight. Although this is not ideal, and a tri-voting system would be better, turning the system off WOULD have saved these two aircraft and all their passengers and crew.
In fact, all they needed was two vanes feeding information to one computer, to discover if there was a vane fault. But Boeing could not even be bothered to do that..!!
Silver
You're right, of course, and even a single FCC could do that (assuming it could see two vanes). Whether or not that turns out to be a solution that Boeing and the regulators are comfortable with may tell us something about their real views of the stability of the bare airframe.