Why did AOA disagree......
We’re also missing the deeper question. We don’t know why AOA disagreed, and how many possible causes. It’s not likely that AOA disagree multiple times on *several fairly new* aircraft, including in the USA and Canada, as a random sensor failure. And if it is random, at the implied rate even a triply redundant system would fail in a population of a thousand aircraft every couple years, so that’s not good enough. Something is catastrophically wrong. There is a root cause we don’t understand.
Additionally, if there can be *any* aerodynamic situation where the plane is going towards stall (which is what MCAS is there to prevent) which also causes AOA disagree, then the pilot is just totally shafted. Because the only thing you can ask of the pilot in that circumstance is to do something that is *different from what MCAS would do*. And in that situation, we have just established the plane is into positive aerodynamic feedback, nosing up into a stall. If the pilot trims up he stalls, if he doesn’t he nosedives.
Translation to softie-land: how impressed would you be by a developer who when faced with a regular crash due to unhandled malloc() failure, just added the handler and called the bug “fixed”?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
