I fly an SR22, which has a yaw damper. It's not strictly necessary -- the SR22 is quite stable without it -- but I'm familiar with the concept. The facts of th

I fly an SR22, which has a yaw damper. It's not strictly necessary -- the SR22 is quite stable without it -- but I'm familiar with the concept. The facts of the MCAS debacle have been litigated to death (literally!) and since you work in the industry you probably know more about them than I do. However, I'm still going to respectfully take issue with this: > There was nothing wrong with the MCAS concept. That's a vacuous claim because "the MCAS concept" is not well-defined. If "the MCAS concept" is something like "an automated control system that always does the Right Thing" then obviously there is nothing wrong with that. But MCAS was never an automated control system that always did the Right Thing. The problems with it were known -- indeed, self-evident -- long before anyone actually died. MCAS was explicitly designed to be an automated control system that sometimes did the Right Thing, and sometimes did the Wrong Thing (with a single point of failure), but that was OK because when it did the Wrong Thing, the human pilots would take over and do the Right Thing in its place [1]. I think it's pretty clear, even without the rather definitive evidence in the form of two lost aircraft, that there is quite a bit wrong with that concept. But maybe we'll just have to agree to disagree about that. And, somewhat less respectfully... > The new engines gave it 15% less fuel burn. This is massive cost savings (and less pollution, too.) I'm sure the families of the victims will take great comfort knowing that their loved ones died efficiently. --- [1] UPDATE: And, I might add, that they were expected to do the Right Thing without any additional training because the whole point of MCAS was to make the new plane behave like the old plane. Which is manifestly failed at rather spectacularly. But that is neither here nor there because I think the case can be made that the "MCAS concept" was flawed even without this little detail.