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Comment by oldjokes | Hacker News Reader

Anything short of admitting "we fundamentally screwed up, and are rethinking the poor decision to pair this engine with this airframe" as well as "we are reviewing all our design processes and how the FAA oversees every step of the process" is unacceptable. MCAS is just the horrific bloody bandage that is peeling away, it's not actually the problem here.

This probably won't happen of course, all they seem to want to do is fix as little as possible as quickly as possible while denying they ever knew anything.

If I were someone powerful like a pilot union leader I would start throwing conniption fits in public and refuse to let my people fly on Max's at all.

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Anything short of admitting "we fundamentally screwed up, and are rethinking the poor decision to pair this engine with this airframe"

Can you cite the basis for this often-expressed sentiment? There's absolutely no reason why a properly-designed and -vetted MCAS system wouldn't have been a perfectly acceptable solution to any handling irregularities caused by the engine configuration.

The idea was fine. The fault was 100% in the implementation.

And no, downvotes are not a valid citation.

It's not impossible to make it work, and in the future I'd expect more and more automated systems in planes for sure.

But you have to recognize the whole engine hack is just a convoluted workaround to avoid as much pilot training as possible. The entire goal of the project seems to be to avoid ever training pilots for as long as possible. It's a brand new plane, the newest plane on the market, and the first thing you need to do to take off is turn off the cabin air conditioning. Why? Because that's what we had to do 50 years ago in the first 737.

God forbid this plane startup any way besides turning off the cabin air conditioning. If we changed that, we'd have to... gasp retrain pilots!

The problem with training pilots for a new machine isn't the training itself but rather, that a pilot is rated for one machine type only. If the MAX had a different type rating, MAX pilots would no longer be rated for the non-MAX 737. There are some larger US carriers which are 737 only, partly so that all pilots are trained for all of the machines. Having to split the fleet into two types would have a huge impact on business. Most likely these carriers would avoid getting any MAX as long as possible.

I don't know what is the correct answer to the problem, but clearly good safety regulations are trapping some carriers and Boeing. Sooner or later Boeing will have to build a true successor to the 737 (and I guess, they now wish they had sooner)

>The problem with training pilots for a new machine isn't the training itself but rather, that a pilot is rated for one machine type only.

Citation needed. I've never heard this before, except for some other person on a message board, and I've been involved with aviation and known pilots with multiple type ratings.

> There's absolutely no reason why a properly-designed and -vetted MCAS system wouldn't have been a perfectly acceptable solution

Surely that was exactly the MCAS that was installed in both of the planes that crashed.

But the fact it failed so badly suggest it might in fact be a rather difficult system to get right.

If you're arguing that MCAS was "properly designed and vetted," you're the only voice crying in that particular wilderness.

Boeing's implementation will be a mainstay in engineering ethics classes for the next 100 years, right next to the Therac-25 and the Kansas City Hyatt.

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