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What regulations are you referring to? Yes, it's true that it would be have been free from this specific MCAS issue. But what other issues would a new design h
by staunch 7y ago
What regulations are you referring to?
Yes, it's true that it would be have been free from this specific MCAS issue. But what other issues would a new design have had? It's impossible to know.
It's also true that if Boeing had done a better job of implementing the MCAS design it would have been viewed as a triumph of software solving hardware problems.
Air France 447 crashed in large part because the pilot flying was incapable of handling the aircraft at cruise speeds without software assisting him. He thought the plane would stop him from doing something stupid but it didn't because the software failed in a somewhat similar way to the MCAS failures (sensor failure).
Airbus hasn't done anything to make their planes easier to fly at cruises speeds without software because software assisting pilots with complex flight characteristics is a fundamentally sound idea. The important thing is that the software actually works. Clearly the first version MCAS did not work reliably but there is no reason to believe that it couldn't work reliably.
- smadurange 7y agoAirbus uses software to enhance safety. MCAS is trying to fix a very specific and a potentially dangerous issue while keeping it from the pilots. So, I'm not sure if there's a good analogy there.
- staunch 7y agoIn both cases the software was designed to prevent the pilot from stalling the aircraft i.e. to enhance safety. And yet hundreds of people died in Air France 447 because the pilot stalled the aircraft when sensor failure disabled the Airbus software without the pilot realizing it. In the case of MCAS, people died because the Boeing software didn't disable itself due to sensor failure. Definitely not the same issue but both examples of software-sensor-related fatal crashes.
- salawat 7y agoAlso note, Airbus has had issues where pilots are so used to the machine not letting them do something stupid, that direct law has caught them by surprise. Automation creates complacency, which can be lethal when things go wrong.