It is the lack of quality control, testing, and qualified oversight, that is the issue.
Yes, MCAS was a band-aid that had too much authority....and pilots were not given enough information about it.
MCAS was Boeing’s way of avoiding a new type-rating that would have cost millions.
Frankly speaking I like the old days when we trusted the Pilots to control the plane. Putting your life in the hands of Electronic Chips without the Pilots ability to override the Software is a risk I would rather not take.
It produced far fewer deaths than a year of automated cars out on the public streets of the DC Metro area would.
Of interest.
There was an article from about a year ago, before the crashes, where the author, almost predicting the future, said that what Boeing needs now is the 757, which had been cancelled years ago. The reason was that airlines were wanting more capacity on relatively short haul flights and travelers were sick of regional plane (smaller ones), and the 757 virtually matched their needs. The 757 sits higher, and has its engines where they belong, under the wing, rather than the goofy Max, which practically has them in front of the nose, due to sitting so low.
But I suspect that the plans and tooling have been ‘recycled’ so as to save storage costs. Not the first time aerospace companies have done the same, just plain stupid. You rent a warehouse outside of Seattle for $3,000 or so a month, throw in all the key tooling, have a relatively small climate-controlled area for the design and certification documentation (carefully indexed), hire a contract guard or two, and put in an alarm system (they can get 24 hour monitoring for less than $30 per month). Utilities are next to nothing in Seattle due to the climate, and so you run the operation for maybe $10k per month, and if you want to resurrect the 757, even 20 years later, it’s all there, and you paid $2.4M for all those years, whereas starting again from scratch would cost well into the billions.
Go figure.
2018...German...one of the well known German makes...and the computers are always telling me what I must,and must not,do. I've had to enlist the help of several younger family members to figure the damn thing out (the owner's manual is around 600 pages).
It's basically a 3,000 pound computer on wheels.
GIGO
By nine dollar an hour programmers.
The entire MCAS system was chocked full of bad software and hardware design. Some of the problems were so blatant that an intelligent 3rd grader could have picked them out. If course then we hear that the software was written in India.
Yet even with all that in mind. If Boeing had put an off switch on MCAS that did not also disable the manual electric trim buttons on the yoke then probably neither of the planes would have crashed. It is a sure thing that the second crash would not have happened. In order to understand that- then one would have had to listen to a professional go through the data from the flight recorder, and explain what it means. Anyone who has not done that should not think that they have any real understanding at all.
“Raise the nose, HAL.” “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Aside from software, engine placement.
Apparently it's underpowered also.
Read restrictions on takeoffs at hot, high airports.
Would they have been cancelled into/out of Denver yesterday? High and hot.
Bring back the 757!!!