This makes no sense, we know that they increase the MCAS action range from 0.6° to 2.5° and they didn't inform FAA of the change.
So, they must have told tests pilots about the feature, otherwise why did they change the parameters ?
The impossible requirement was that the plane had to behave in such a way that pilots wouldn't need to know the correction system existed. If you work under that pressure for long enough, and enough of the engineers who realize it was BS move on, retire, etc, then as you approach the deadline, you rationalize and justify more and more. You've already embraced the idea that commercial pilots won't need to know about the existence this system that corrects the attitude of the plane, you've already rationalized leaving it out of the documentation and training and pretending it's not part of the control system. So why would test pilots need to know the parameters either? At the point they were at, this was a tiny leap to make.
It is still incredible. There was one big change in a high volume plane and that one big change should have been tested and tested again. Somehow Boeing started to believe their own cool aid.
The more I think about the MAX the scarier it gets. What if one engine fails during start? The forward mounted other engine goes full throttle pulling up more than pilots are trained to handle.
I find it so huge that it is hard to believe. Unless they took SW guys with no clue about how to do their jobs, like fresh graduate with no mentoring, or even outsourced to a SW shop ? I would never take responsability of such a change without even talking to the pilots about it.
It is hundred timed worse than the VW engineers who cheated the homologation test.
In VW's case, it's clear as day that it was malice and greed. In Boeings case, I was willing to write it down as incompetence at first, but as time goes by, I'm becoming more inclined to put it on the malice bin.
The danger of air pollution and global warming is that it's so hard to quantify the effects, but we already know that it's huge.
The pitchup is caused by aerodynamic forces on the engine at high angle of attack.