> It's misleading to say they prioritized making it fly like its predecessor over safety.
The internal Boeing emails literally say otherwise.
> In theory there was absolutely nothing wrong with a system LIKE MCAS. In fact the 737 MAX is still approved to fly with it.
I never said that MCAS had any issues in theory. And the 737 MAX was mostly "approved" by Boeing's self-regulators, where emails trails (again literally) had anybody raising questions or concerns sidelined.
> The flaws were in the specific implementation and documentation around it, not with the idea of the system itself.
Yes, because Boeing's top priority was making it so that no expensive extra training was required to fly the MAX, despite the fact that MCAS was designed to deal with some situations that could cause the plane to fly differently.
> If you want to be pedantic about it...
Yes, I am being pedantic about it. The trim issues in the crashes were (intermittently) caused by MCAS, but there was no specific documentation or specific training as to how to deal with it in the case of faulty MCAS sensors. There were indeed several MCAS incidents in western flights, but they were different as the failures were different. The two crashed pilots did indeed attempt disabling MCAS but the intermittent failures masked the problem and there were insufficient checklists by boeing, because had they existed it could have allueded to the fact that such situations may need new simulator time.
The MCAS issue was totally and completely recoverable if it were properly documented, but doing that would have almost certainly guaranteed the simulator time that was Boeing's top priority to avoid.
Almost all the reports about pilot capability differences had more to do with experience than it did training. These "developing" countries have younger airlines and pilots who don't have the same pipeline of pilots with decades of experience, including the military like in the US. MCAS "acted up" on several other Lion Air flights that the pilots corrected for as well, but again those were different failure modes.
The fact that the Ethiopian Airlines had perfectly acceptable safety record on other planes negates that these are "poorly trained" pilots. They've had one major accident in 2010 that was attributed to pilot error, but most of the rest were due to bad luck (eg bird strikes) or hijackings.
> A large part of why modern jetliners are so safe is exactly because of flight control augmentations like this...
I never even mentioned MCAS by name. Yes, modern jetliners are safe because of these kinds of systems. Airbus planes will not allow pilots to do many things no matter what, even. But these systems are documented, pilots trained on them, and go through rigorous testing because in most cases they're designed to make a plane safer, not try to deal with aerodynamic changes.
Boeing wanted no new simulator training despite the MAX being a very different aircraft due to changed engine placement. That was the cause. If Boeing wasn't trying to avoid new simulator training the 737 MAX is a perfectly fine aircraft as far as we know.
The 787 had similar issues as the overriding goal of the program was to get as much capital expenditure off of Boeing's books, but all of the outsourcing led to a nightmare when trying to assemble the plane and there was no unified quality control program, or even a straight line of responsibility.