4 ms·

I don't understand how your post squares with what happened in reality.

• cameldrv 8y ago
  Boeing has delivered 376 737MAXes since May 2017. About as many were delivered in 2019 as 2017, so figure their median age is 9 months. Figure a month from delivery to going into full service. That makes for 90,578 flight days of service. Figure 6 flights per day, you get about half a million flights. We know that the AoA vane had a failure in at least 3 flights, and we should probably assume that there were another three failures on the alternate side. That gives a failure rate of 6/500,000 = 1.2*10^-5. That's about 8x better than my spitball 10^-4. The reason two planes have gone down is that the MCAS cure is worse than the instability disease. MCAS incorrectly activates at 10^-5, and empirically this failure is 66% fatal. If you can get MCAS to only activate when it's needed, the fact that it won't always be there to protect you is not so crucial. Think about it like this: Would it bother you if the airbag in your car only went off 99.9% of the time when you got in an accident? It shouldn't, and it would hardly make any difference in auto fatalities. On the other hand, if the airbag in your car randomly went off on 0.1% of drives you took, you'd have that happen to you once a year or so, and there's a good chance that it would eventually cause you lose control of your car and crash.