Hey, I don't mean to pick on you, and I'm not a pilot, but everything in this comment seems incorrect in one way or another: > It’s an optional extra so I susp

Hey, I don't mean to pick on you, and I'm not a pilot, but everything in this comment seems incorrect in one way or another: > It’s an optional extra so I suspect that one led was being charged at an absurd rate The optional extra is actually an AoA visual display, and the light just comes along for the ride with the display. It's letting you know that you can't rely on the AoA display. It's not trying to communicate danger or emergency. That's not its job. There's already a system called EICAS for the plane to communicate urgent errors to the pilots, and that's where pilots look. > because it was actually necessary It really really wasn't. That light should not be used by pilots to diagnose anything. We don't want pilots to have to know how the airplane's internal systems were built. The MCAS system ultimately performs trim operations. We want pilots to notice trim aberrations, which have many possible causes (including purely mechanical ones!), and know how to disable the trim motor if the automatic trim is malfunctioning. If they can do that, they can solve many more problems than just MCAS. And if they can't do that, their plane will nosedive from many more causes than just MCAS. > I haven’t seen any indication anywhere that suggested that the problem persisted for that entire flight As I understand it, it didn't persist on the flight the day before because the third pilot correctly noticed that the trim was misbehaving and performed the STAB TRIM CUTOUT that disables the motor, as trained. If the motor hadn't been disabled, MCAS would have continued to use it to mistrim. > I’d question a flight control system that pushes the nose down apparently without considering altitude Why? Wing stalls are the most common cause of aviation fatalities. They usually happen during takeoff or landing, at less than 1000ft. If they happened at altitude they wouldn't be fatal because you have time to recover from them. If one is building a system to try to prevent wing stalls -- and one should because it's the lowest hanging fruit for reducing the fatality rate of aviation -- that system should absolutely operate at low altitudes when you're in the critical period of a stall being effectively unrecoverable once a spin starts, because it takes a minimum of hundreds of feet to recover. That's the time when the system matters most.