Hundreds of people are dead because of the stupidity Boeing’s personnel and management. The override capability of the MCAS system was the result of programmers and engineers mistakenly thinking that they new more about flying airplanes than pilots do. The unforgivable arrogance of their failure to include an “off” button is matched only by hubris of Boeing’s management. They deliberately chose to not inform the pilots of this system’s crash ensuring capability under certain simple sensor failures. If Boeing loses another aircraft to this kind of stupidity, they will be bankrupted. And rightly so.
I'm glad to see that you have much more experience designing aircraft than Boeing.
Maybe they should run all of the hundreds of thousands of engineering decisions that they have to make on every new project through you before they implement them.
The purpose of MCAS was to make the 737 MAX handle the same as the 737 NG so that pilots didn't have to be type rated for one aircraft or the other, but that they could fly either type. (Airline pilots are only allowed to be type rated on one type of aircraft at a time for revenue operations.)
What the 737 MAX is not, is more prone to stall than the the 737 NG. What is different is that the controls lighten up more on the MAX than the NG, so the controls feel different near maximum AoA. MCAS was to trim the aircraft so that it felt like the 737 NG.
MCAS would only come into play during a very narrow and seldom seen flight regime of 1) autopilot off, 2) high angle of attack, and 3) slow speed. These conditions are rarely if ever seen in normal operations, so MCAS would seldom if ever actually be needed.
Where the engineers screwed up, and they screwed up royally, was not in deciding to add MCAS to the flight control software, it was in failing to fully take into account the consequences of an AOA sensor failure. Since MCAS would only rarely if ever operate under normal circumstances, it wasn't treated as the critical flight control system that it should have been, which includes adding redundancy to the system to mitigate single point failures. For that, Boeing was very wrong.
Boeing DID PROVIDE AN OFF BUTTON. It is called the STAB TRIM cutout switches and they are right on the throttle control column, and are a mandatory memory item that pilots are supposed to be able to remedy from memory without having to use a checklist.
After the Lion Air crash, Boeing sent out explicit instructions to all operators of the 737 MAX outlining MCAS, what its symptoms were, and how to immediately mitigate any problem with the system.
The Ethiopian Air pilots were required to read and sign off on this notice. When the MCAS system on their flight malfunctioned due to a faulty AOA sensor, they did turn off the STAB TRIM cutout switches. Then they turned them back on, and crashed.
Yes, Boeing was stupid, but not because they put MCAS in the flight control software, but because they didn't provide redundant cross checks of the two AOA sensors when determining when to activate MCAS. Instead, they only used the input from one AOA sensor.
They have added the cross check now, and the MAX should be back in the air by December.
And if you think Boeing are the only humans making mistakes when designing aircraft, then you've forgotten the Airbus crashes that resulted from faulty speed sensing pitot tubes. In all Airbus aircraft, unlike the manual backup 737, all flight control is done through a computer, and if the computer thinks your control input will cause the aircraft to stall, it won't implement that command. But when the computer doesn't get the correct data, like airspeed, it mistakenly vetoes the pilots commands.
Look up Air France 447.