I believe that is overstating things. From what I gather, it is during specific flight conditions, namely high angles of attack at high airspeeds, encountered d

I believe that is overstating things. From what I gather, it is during specific flight conditions, namely high angles of attack at high airspeeds, encountered during an extreme manoeuvre (definitely not straight and level flight), namely a wind-up turn (a turn at increasing bank angle and constant speed and constant power (note that this implies accelerating descent), rarely if ever encountered during a routine flight). This is flown to test the stick force as a function of load factor. Now, it is a certification requirement that the stick force increases basically linearly with the load factor ("The stick force curve must have a stable slope" [3]), and that was not given - the stick slacked. This is what MCAS was designed to address. From what I gather, a 737 MAX without MCAS would not be certifiable, but safely flyable, possibly with some surprising, but manageable behaviour under very rare circumstances: namely, flying at a high angle of attack with high speed would require you to release some stick force instead of having to pull hard to keep the nose up. Having said that, the whole saga has revealed so many problems at Boeing and the FAA that I am reluctant to fly the 737 MAX and 787 myself. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/the-inside-story-of-mcas-how-boeings-737-max-system-gained-power-and-lost-safeguards/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/the... https://www.scribd.com/document/53095046/NASA-Information-Summaries-Wind-Up-Turn https://www.scribd.com/document/53095046/NASA-Information-Su... [3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.175 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.175