I don't doubt that Boeing will fix the MCAS problem, but the bigger issue for me is what other systems were hacked into place in order to rush this plane to market to compete with Airbus? The whole philosophy behind the design of the 737 MAX is what has me unsettled, not necessarily this one particular issue.
This. We have seen that there was another problem only noticed because of the extra scrutiny. We have a saying in the software business: two is an impossible number.
That said, the Air France Airbus dive into the ocean was caused by an equally stupid design decision that should never have shipped. Pilot and copilot were applying opposite force on the joystick, and instead of a siren going off, it just averaged them. Have they even fixed that yet? It was in ever Airbus.
The difference being that Airbus pilots are trained and aware of this behaviour. If it's inherently dangerous why aren't they falling out of the sky?
They are trained and aware, but in high stress situations pilots sometimes forget things like that, which was significant in the air france crash. The pilot who had better control of the situation only momentarily pressed the button used to take full control, when you are supposed to hold it as long as you wish to keep control. I believe the "dual input" warning was also not aggressive enough at the time
It didn't help that the pilot flying was the one that made the error, and the other one, who correctly understood the situation, was the pilot monitoring. Even more, the pilot monitoring didn't explicitly take control of the aircraft - "My aircraft". Bonin was under the impression that he's in charge, and was utterly confused by the whole situation, until the end.
As with each aviation accident, it's not a single cause of failure - it's a swiss cheese model of failures, where it just happened that all the holes aligned - from the flight law dropping to alternate, to Bonin who didn't trust what the computers said, to the other pilots not understanding completely what Bonin did, to the pitot tubes freezing.
Afaik, Airbus announces "Dual Input" in such a case.
> it just averaged them
As opposed to Boeing's "lets pick one and hope to dear God that it's the correct one"?
How would you handle opposing input where any of the two pilots might give the incorrect input?