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Under the certification for previous 737s the AOA sensors were not considered safety critical as the plane can be flown to its destination with a faulty sensor (although it then needs to be taken in for maintenance).
They got round the requirement for duplication of AOA sensors by having the original MCAS system rely on additional acceleration sensors. This was when it was thought the MAX only showed excessive pitching up at high speed. However, when further testing showed the MAX pitched up unduly at low speed, Boeing extended MCAS to low-speed flight. In these regimes, the acceleration data was less reliable, so Boeing removed as an input to MCAS - which meant the software only had one, potentially faulty, input AND it was four times as powerful as originally specified to cope with low-speed flight.
They then screwed up further by having the previously separate AOA-disagree warning on the primary flight display linked to the option AOA indicator display. Boeing says this was an unintentional issue in the software design and originally claimed it had no bearing on the Lion Air crash.
There are so many screwups in the MAX story; from the failure to mention MCAS to pilots, to failing to tell them how to disable it, to deleting materials on how to deal with a runaway stabiliser (something they’d known about since the original 737-100), to the smearing of airlines and crews who wanted more training.
The whole management and some of the senior engineers should be in jail for the deaths of hundreds of people and having dragged a once great company and a centre of engineering excellence through the mud.
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they better should, yes;
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I’m gonna go with an attempted coverup. Since there’s now a criminal probe, overwriting the video will definitely garner them an obstruction of justice charge on top of however many criminal negligence charges they end up with.
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Coverup sounds about right.
Just enough time for guilty parties to get out while the gittin’s good.
Meantime, we can watch out for the dumping of stock by the C-suite and those adjacent to 'em, a shuffle of Boeing’s board of directors and at least one fall guy (and her/his/their requisite golden parachute) and a big big PR rebrand pushing the narrative about how the company is really-no-we-swear-this-time-for-sure addressing its safety issues.
In 5, 4, 3, 2…
Ye gods I hate this timeline.
Through someone’s bad actions and bad faith, people died–no, were killed.
Late stage capitalists have a lot to answer for. (I mean, besides them wrecking our home planet and causing massive suffering.)
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