Originally Posted by
Icarus2001
It may be too late to USE IT in that instance but it can sure guide future decisions.
Many aviation regulations are built on the blood of dead passengers and crews for that very reason.
In this instance I was pointing out that comparing the cost to Boeing to make changes that made no business sense vs the cost of the current delay cannot be a basis of criticizing the decision. The alternative is to spend $10 Billion on every engineering design point on the off chance that a failure there could generate a similar cost in the future.
What failed in this case is imagination - that pilots would not re-trim the plane to lower the control forces to a point they could manage.
A similar failure of imagination occurred within the FAA over allowing passenger access to the cockpit that led to four hijacked planes setting off two major wars and probably dozens of smaller ones, and likely leading to the ultimate killing of a million civilians before it's all over. The FAA had 20/20 hindsight over planes that had been crashed under similar circumstances. It did no good.
People do learn from certain mistakes and regulations are written in blood - but they rarely avoid new mistakes.