[salawat]

FAA testing disproves your contention that "good pilots wouldn't have lost the plane." That was part of the reason they eventually mandated the rearchitecture of the flight computer due to it representing a single physical point of failure

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/newly...

One of the three seasoned test pilots (the civilian one) ended up losing the plane due to a single-event upset cascading to false positive activation of MCAS consistent with the Ethiopian Airlines disaster. I.e. the system activating at non-extreme AoA.

Also, not pulling power was justified due to the malfunction of the AoA sensor resulting in an airspeed unreliable state, the response to which is essentially "set throttles to what they should be for that stage of the flight", which was climb out in Ethiopias case, and from a hot and high airport to boot. They also ran through the procedures written by Boeing to a T. The fact that Boeing intentionally withheld important implementation details from the pilots can't really be used against them. The measure of incompetence is to not know something you absolutely should. The Ethiopian pilots had none of that info, and Lion Air swapped in a garbage part, and had bad paperwork in the logs, and furthermore, we're known to be at risk of "flying by rote" by Boeing. This damns Boeing even more, since they knew of the local minima in terms of safe operating style, yet still left out the information those pilots would have needed to safely fly the plane, ostensibly so as not to draw scrutiny from regulators.

In short, appealing to the need of a master airman to fly a demonstrably physically dangerous (and possibly unairworthy given explicit prescriptive criteria in the FAR's) aircraft doesn't speak volumes to the overall safety of the aircraft, which puts fault squarely in the corner of the manufacturer who self-certified the safety of their design.