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My question is if this ON-OFF switch was really a safety feature (and I believe it was and is) then why FAA turned the blind eye during the aircraft certificati

My question is if this ON-OFF switch was really a safety feature (and I believe it was and is) then why FAA turned the blind eye during the aircraft certification process and did not ask Boeing to make it Standard on every MAX plane they ship? Shouldn't the blame for those 2 air disasters be equally then shared by FAA along with Boeing because every air regulation agency in the world looks at FAA as a leading org among them all. Edit (as seeing downvote due to the possible tone of the comment): What I am saying is basically this should have been flagged by the FAA during the certification process. Maybe that was not part of the process but making sure to check which optional features offered are safety related could be absolutely critical for air safety. Edit 2: I meant ON-OFF Light here

deleted 7y ago
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cjbprime 7y ago
I have no idea what you mean. Which ON-OFF switch? No-one was talking about an ON-OFF switch. There is no optional ON-OFF switch. The article is about an optional warning. Not an optional switch.
- gordon_freeman 7y ago
  I meant the ON-OFF Light -- the AoA disagree light that turns on when both sensors have different readings (during a possible malfunction of the sensor with bad data) and keeps off when both sensors have same reading on the angle of attack.
  - cjbprime 7y ago
    Oh. Then the answer appears to be that Boeing misled the FAA into thinking that MCAS didn't have the capability to cause a catastrophic failure, by understating the degree of control authority it was capable of, and therefore AoA sensor failure (and the disagree light) wasn't tied to any airworthiness issue. I don't think a light (rather than annunciator) can be a very serious safety feature in any case, simply because in an emergency pilots aren't going to be looking at random places throughout the cockpit to see which small lights are on. They're going to be looking at the central EICAS display, which is what they're trained to do.

deleted 7y ago

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cjbprime 7y ago

I have no idea what you mean. Which ON-OFF switch? No-one was talking about an ON-OFF switch. There is no optional ON-OFF switch. The article is about an optional warning. Not an optional switch.

gordon_freeman 7y ago
I meant the ON-OFF Light -- the AoA disagree light that turns on when both sensors have different readings (during a possible malfunction of the sensor with bad data) and keeps off when both sensors have same reading on the angle of attack.
- cjbprime 7y ago
  Oh. Then the answer appears to be that Boeing misled the FAA into thinking that MCAS didn't have the capability to cause a catastrophic failure, by understating the degree of control authority it was capable of, and therefore AoA sensor failure (and the disagree light) wasn't tied to any airworthiness issue. I don't think a light (rather than annunciator) can be a very serious safety feature in any case, simply because in an emergency pilots aren't going to be looking at random places throughout the cockpit to see which small lights are on. They're going to be looking at the central EICAS display, which is what they're trained to do.