Originally Posted by
Water pilot
That is just words on paper, which can be changed. Only very slight weasel wording required, perhaps "unless the aircraft is equipped with <something that can be easily added to the MAX>". Electrical codes are full of this sort of exception, in my opinion. I can tell you for sure that NIST standards are.
What is ironic about this whole debacle is that the rule that MCAS was designed for is intended to prevent stalls which are commonly trained for, and the implementation introduced the possibility of a runaway trim sort of behavior which seems to be an esoteric sort of failure that is so rare that it wasn't deemed worth doing much training on. It seems like sim training on how to avoid the part of the envelope where the force gradient gets wonky, followed by how to recover from the stall if the worst case happens. The second part should be a cakewalk to a professional jet pilot, right? You don't even get an interview if you can't do that, I assume.
I think you're pretty close to the big question: Is it
really only about stick force? If that were the case, why wouldn't it have been easier to massage some weasel words in the regs?