I hate to be this cynical, but I wonder about industrial espionage and purposeful design flaws.
China and/or India?
nevernevergiveup...total control of an AC during TO and Landing to the Auto pilot and allow the human to intervene at the flip of 1 switch not 2 or 3.
Never been a big fan of Auto P during landing and take off, but that just me.
A Horizontal Jack Screw out of control will kill ya.
Here’s my latest explanation of the 737 MAX:
An important way to increase the miles-per-gallon of a plane is to reduce the size of the wing. A wing needs to be large enough for takeoffs and landings. They have flaps to increase the size during those periods.
In normal flight the wings don’t need to be as large as they need to be during takeoff and landing.
So Boeing puts a small wing on the 737 MAX and makes up for it by putting on more powerful engines requiring a greater angle of attack to make the small wings have the necessary lift at low speeds.
This combination of things gets the plane off the ground but the smaller wings operating at higher angle of attack make it harder to control during the slow-speed climb. Not impossible but tricky. Computer help is very useful if it works properly.
I’d fly a 778 MAX in America with no hesitation. Our pilots by now know fully how to handle it.
First was the pressure that Boeing was getting from various airlines to provide more fuel-efficient aircraft.
Second was the pressure from Airbus with the upcoming release of their competitive new SE plane.
Third was an archaic web of regulation that permitted Boeing to not need to undergo a full certification of the MAX to get it out of the door quickly.
Fourth was the configuration of the aircraft from a stability standpoint (a result of Boeing taking a shortcut via the first three above and patching the instability with a software program). You cannot change the wing, loading, and power configuration of the engines without taking into account the body profile itself.
Fifth was the programming of the MCAS system to rely on a single sensor -- the Angle of Attack sensor -- which according to aerospace engineers I spoke to can have an error factor of 10-20%.
Lastly is the somewhat secretive way they rolled this out, keeping the instability of the airframe quiet and not performing full training on the new system to affected pilots.
This aircraft should have never been certified. Boeing needs to pull it and go back to the drawing board to design the way they should have in the first place.
No, just safety checks effectively falsified from management’s desire to cut costs and get this to market under a super-abbreviated review when it actually needed much more review and less inspection falsification.
Occam’s Razor.
I made essentially the same comment a few days ago.
The plane could never have passed certification with a “hands-on” software glitch of this magnitude...unless allegations underscoring this story have merit. In such a case, it would seem that someone or group of people within Boeing (at a minimum) conspired to hide a serious stability problem with the addition of the new engines to an old airframe design.
If the latter is the case, sell your Boeing stock now.