| Pilot here... This NYTimes article is a recommended read. The author discusses the role of pilots who lack good airmanship (pilot training outside the US relies much more on rote memorization versus learning to fly small planes and/or in the military). https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c... Boeing certainly messed up with the MCAS system design, but a perhaps bigger error was to over-estimate pilot skills and intuition. A good "stick and rudder" pilot would have cut out the automation promptly and likely recovered from the situation. For example, one of the factors in the crashes was airspeed. The pilots left the throttle at takeoff power, and accelerated to such a high speed that it was not possible to counteract the nose down moment. Also, had they noted the airspeed, they would have immediately known that they were not at risk of stalling, and that they were dealing with an instrumentation/automation failure (in which case you cut out the automation and hand fly the plane). This does not absolve Boeing. MCAS violated their "pilot first" design pattern. It should have simply activated the stick shaker and an audio alert (and redundant sensor inputs should have been in place to minimize false positives). That said, the way pilots are trained in countries where light aviation is not a thing is an issue to be dealt with. |