| "From the days immediately following the Lion Air accident, we've had teams of our top engineers and technical experts working tirelessly..." If they've been working tirelessly, then they should have understood the risks and grounded the fleet. Either they understood the risks, but neglected to ground the fleet, or they didn't understand the risks and hence we can't trust the fix. I also find it sort of nauseating that the CEO implicitly gets the message through that the fix already has been worked on for a long time, has thus matured, can now be fully trusted, and we are just weeks away from flying with a safe plane. I don't buy any of it. Let's analyse this critically. The MCAS still needs to augment the flight characteristics. There is nothing that can be fundamentally changed regarding this fact. We can only change the conditions under which MCAS activates and the conditions under which it is deactivated. It still has to have the same authority for a nose-down and recovering from an erroneous high-magnitude nose-down will still be mechanically hard or require additional pilot knowledge and actions. The latter should be impossible without recertification. The operational characteristics of the airplane are not matched with the operational controls offered to the pilots, by design constraint. The plane is thus unsafe and will forever be unsafe, without redesign and recertification, because with the constraints in place, they can only add additional information on displays, add more reliability by having the MCAS utilise input from more sensors, add more conditions under which the the MCAS deactivates, etc, but none of this attacks the fundamental impedance mismatch between characteristics and controls, as well as the lack of education for it. Deactivation also simply exchanges the risk of stalls for nose downs. All-in-all, the MAX is simply an airplane with a worse flight envelope as far as safety is concerned, and nothing can be done about it. |