Originally Posted by
MechEngr
The question is about what it would feel like. I think it would feel as much like an NG at a similar load as anything because pilots spend so little time at high AoA and also little time hand flying that they have no good basis for comparison. We already have record of a flight without MCAS in the first Lion Air situation non-crash flight. The pilots made no comment on any difficulty of hand flying besides the obvious loss of electric trim.
You cannot use a stick pusher to change the balance of aerodynamic forces on the the plane, which MCAS does and a stick pusher does not. And if that stick pusher had the same authority to apply full-down elevator with as much force on the column as MCAS produced because, for the same AoA system malfunction, the controls felt the plane was in a deep stall, there would still be the same crashes.
The question is what it flies like, not what it feels like. MCAS may re-linearise MAX to resemble NG in normal flight, but we don't know when and whether the behavior of Max can depart from that of the NG.
A good example of this might be stall onset and deep stall recovery. Are they the same?
Another nastier example is recovery from a strong accidental pitchdown.
We can continue to argue this forever; it'll only be put to rest when either Boeing publishes the data, a non-us regulator rebels and does a test flight, or someone constructs a detailed aerodynamical simulation of the Max.
Edmund