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> Possibly the newest Airbus A350 might have what you describe already, but they don’t tend to back port this stuff to the older systems in older airframe famil
by cptcobalt 4y ago
> Possibly the newest Airbus A350 might have what you describe already, but they don’t tend to back port this stuff to the older systems in older airframe families.
It's not that they don't tend to, it's that airlines don't want this — training management and recertification on behavioral changes is costly for them. See Southwest influencing 737 MAX development—MCAS was a result to try to reduce the characteristic changes between aircraft & engine variants. (Band-aid driven development!)
I sincerely hope that the 737 MAX incidents change the industry mentality to encourage safety features to be backported to older airframes, even if it seems untenable now. For example, the 737 MAX uses older crew alerting methods—annunciator lights—not EICAS, which can be thought of as a centralized actionable list of anomalies.
- kayfox 4y agoMCAS was used to make the aircraft conform to the regulations, it could not be omitted. It is intended to increase the control force at a point in order to assure control forces steadily increase into a stall. (See 14 CFR 25.203 -- Stall characteristics. (FAR 25.203)) The fact that it was not communicated in the training and manuals was a result of lobbying by the airlines.