| I respectfully disagree. A news article calling them flaws does not make them a flaw. Here's the issue: At lower speeds such as you'd see during a landing approach, the throttle setting of the 737 Max directly affects its pitch. If the pilot were to suddenly reduce throttle, the nose would pitch up. This is due to the engine's more forward position. The forward position of the engines was done so that they wouldn't have to re-engineer half the plane to fit the larger engines. High bypass turbo fans are big, and they couldn't maintain ground clearance without either moving the engines up higher or making the landing gear longer. To move the engines higher they had to move them forward. So they did. The new behavior of the aircraft required retraining and making sure pilots knew how the throttle and pitch were related. Mind you, a lot of aircraft have such relationships, so this is not in itself a flaw. The real flaw came when they decided to replace training with software, and then conveniently forgot to tell anybody about the robo-pilot that they put in the cockpit. THAT was the failure. The airplane itself, even without MCAS at all, would be a bit more of a handful to fly, but nothing terrible. With a properly functioning MCAS, and proper training about how to disable it in case of a problem, the issue is solved. And that's what the FAA believed happened when they recertified the 737 MAX to fly again. But by now the reputation has been tarnished so badly that we're hearing news about unrelated failures because it happened on a 737 MAX. So you can see the real failure isn't aerodynamic, its pretty much everything else. If I got any details wrong, I apologize. I'm flying by the seat of my pants on this layman's analysis after a long day. |
Any conventional airliner has this "flaw". If you are at low airspeed and you push the throttles forward, an A320 will exhibit nose-up pitch, too. It's a direct consequence of having giant engines slung kinda-sorta-underneath the wings of a low-wing monoplane.