Re: The reason that the Max series need MCAS
Oh, I didn't mean the pilots should not know about MACS: what I meant was that the failure mode of 'I give up, it's your plane now' tends to result in bad things when people become very used to having the system help them. I'm not sure there's a way around that: I expect the answer is that very automated planes do have these nasty failure modes and will occasionally crash because they drop into some manual mode and the pilots fail to cope. That does not mean they're not still safer, of course.
In the case of MACS people seem to be saying there are only two sensors so there's an obvious split-brain possibility: having three would make it a whole lot safer it seems to me.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
