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If there’s any corner cutting here it’s around AoA sensor redundancy and flight worthiness testing. The reason MCAS is there is that the 737 was too low to the

If there’s any corner cutting here it’s around AoA sensor redundancy and flight worthiness testing. The reason MCAS is there is that the 737 was too low to the ground to fit newer, bigger, more fuel-efficient engines under the wing, which is what Boeing’s customers wanted, so they had to move the engines forward and compensate for the resulting handling effects in software. Without some form of MCAS there would be no 737-MAX at all, and it’s not fair to say that the whole plane was a corner cutting exercise either, it was an attempt to improve an older, proven design driven by customer demand.

CaptainZapp 7y ago
Without some form of MCAS there would be no 737-MAX at all, and it’s not fair to say that the whole plane was a corner cutting exercise either, it was an attempt to improve an older, proven design driven by customer demand. I would argue that they applied a software kludge on a design, which is basically no more fit to fly in such a configuration. They did that because Airbus' 320 NEO put them into full throttle panic mode. Espeically since American, a lifelong Boeing customer, considered a pretty big order with Airbus. So, instead of a completely new clean-sheet design (which they considered) they rushed a plane to market, which needed to be fixed with software because it's inherently not fit to fly without such fixes and slapped a 737 sticker onto the plane because of competitive advantage. The obviously dodgy shenanigans applied in the certification process also don't really help.