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Comment by heisenbit | Hacker News Reader

It may be that they kept this information in a small circle. MCAS was supposed to keep the plane flying similar so discussions of where this idealized model was breaking were kept quiet.

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.

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You mean that the engineers quietly analyzed the test flight data and decided to increase the parameters on their own, so that the flight data show similarity between a MAX and a NG ?

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.

"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence".

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.

Isn’t most/all of Boeing’s development done overseas now? I wonder if that divide makes it easier to assume this is okay.

VW has a much bigger silent impact of millions of people dying every year, while Boeing has probably less than 1000 people killed from this mistake.

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.

That's the kind of shenanigan that makes test pilots demand ejection seats...

Moving the engine backwards or forwards along its thrust line does not cause changes in its moment around the plane's center of gravity.

The pitchup is caused by aerodynamic forces on the engine at high angle of attack.

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