[philjohn]

"If plane at a low altitude at full power is stalling, just lower the nose."

Except as can be seen time and again basic instinct can kick in "damn, plane is falling, I need to be higher" and pilots have been known to pull back on the stick to get height.

[zaroth]

A pilot that deals with a stall by pulling up has failed their training.

As I recall, we practiced low speed flight and recovering from a low speed stall either the 2nd or 3rd time I ever went up in a Cessna. Power on stalls were a few days later, they are quite different.

I never did get my license, mainly because I experienced moderate nausea / motion sickness which I thought would abate after a dozen flights or so, but never really got over it.

The problem isn’t that pilots can’t or shouldn’t be relied upon to detect and recover from stalls or near-stalls by increasing throttle and decreasing pitch.

The problem appears to be that a new system, added for the purpose of making a new plane with different handling / characteristics behave the same as an older one for training purposes, is malfunctioning.

The plane could be perfectly safe without MCAS but pilots would have had to be recertified.

[pdonis]

> The plane could be perfectly safe without MCAS

It depends on what you mean by "perfectly safe". Many people believe that having the yoke effort decrease at higher angles of attack instead of increase is not very safe. That's why the FAA certification requirements force manufacturers to do whatever is necessary to make sure the yoke force increases with increasing angle of attack, so the pilot has to exert more effort to pull up at higher angles of attack. Without MCAS, the 737 MAX as designed would not meet this requirement.