Re: the dangerous software known as MCAS
After two years of service, it was so dangerous there were zero crashes and zero reported close calls in Europe, in North America, and in the wealthy Asian countries.
You can bury your head in the sand all you want. Those who look at the facts can easily see that the way that MCAS was designed is so bad that it wouldn’t be fit for a toy. Not just one serious design problem, but many. It was criminally negligent.
After two years of service, it was so dangerous there were zero crashes and zero reported close calls in Europe, in North America, and in the wealthy Asian countries.
That is because their pilots are highly trained and have a vigorous training standard unlike third world countries...
“After two years of service, it was so dangerous there were zero crashes and zero reported close calls in Europe, in North America, and in the wealthy Asian countries.”
That’s how I see it.
The only flaw in the 737MAX is that idiots might not know how to fly it. Not that the two unfortunate pilots were actually idiots, but the problem, I believe, is that they didn’t know how to fly the plane.
I know at times it’s difficult to be objective, especially in modern society that has become so polarized that if A supports B then A will believe B is perfect no matter what B does or doesn’t do. B could stand for Boeing, a favorite politician who can do no wrong, or even a car (eg Mustang fans saying the new C8 ‘vette is crap when it’s shockingly amazing). No room for objective thinking - just straight myopia and tribal thinking.
But you made a salient point, and let me try and respond to it.
You make a good point - no crashes in the US, Western Europe or Wealthy Asia. Let us ignore for the moment those American Airlines pilot who complained about the Max (or the testing that showed a real issue with the system) and look at the point you made. You are correct, and why?
Well, a mathematician might say it’s luck of the draw! Even in the ‘poor’ countries there were MANY Boeing 737 Maxs’ in service, flying several times a day, every day. They were all flown by ‘inexperienced’ pilots, and flown for many months since their introduction. And ‘only’ two crashes! This, it could be a sad permutation.
My money - as well as yours I believe - would also go to training. American commercial pilots are VERY well trained, with many of them former military flyers who went through the most rigorous aerial regimen invented by man. Thus, I believe had it occurred to an AA or Delta pilot they would have fixed it (let’s ignore the testing again that had trained American pilots fail to recover when put in the same situation though).
The problem though is this: Imagine you had a fridge in your kitchen that would - occasionally - automatically disconnect a pipe and spew water all over your nice kitchen floor. It may go for a year without doing it, or it may do it in the next ten minutes.
However, your spouse and kids know how to ‘handle’ it. They need to tap it three times on its left side hard. The instruction manual even says that’s what you should do - Tap it three times hard on the left and it will not gush water.
So, your family is ‘trained’ on how to handle the fridge, they are 100% ‘competent’ in handling the fridge, and they even know the exact tapping sequence to make it stop leaking (say, Tap to the tune of Yankee Doodle).
That would still be a shitty fridge!
The Boeing 737 Max is a shitty plane, and I love Boeings (mostly fly them, including the previous iteration 737NG).
Just like your shitty fridge that occasionally thinks it’s an untrained puppy and wets the floor, the 737 Max is a shitty plane that occasionally wants to kiss the earth. And no amount of explanation or excuses - whether the pilots were NASA shuttle pilots or Mr Bean - can take away the fact it has a shitty system that occasionally tries to go Terminator on people.