Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dTal 2643 days ago
> MCAS alternates between the left and right sensor each time the plane lands

This sounds like spectacularly bad design that manages to extract negative value from having two sensors. What is the logic behind this?

1 comments

Pilots and first officers tend to switch who has flight control on each leg of their flights (which is the Pilot Flying vs Pilot Assisting), and the MCAS system uses the AoA vane associated with the side of the cockpit that currently has flight control.

There is no good reason for only listening to one sensor.

There is a sort of good reason for having a split between pilot/copilot side: the instruments are redundant (both physically and electrically), so in the event of malfunction you can failover to the other side.