Thread by @ComradeArthur

How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer.
pjmedia.com/instapundit/32…
"instead of going back to the drawing board and getting the airframe hardware right Boeing relied on" (a software patch)

"MCAS is implemented in the flight management computer, even at times when the autopilot is turned off, *** when the pilots think they are flying *** the plane. "

"Like someone with narcissistic personality disorder, MCAS gaslights the pilots. And it turns out badly for everyone. “Raise the nose, HAL.” “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”"

The MCAS is the bitey dog.

"In MCAS, the flight management computer is blind to any other evidence that it is wrong, including what the pilot sees with his own eyes and what he does when he desperately tries to pull back on the robotic control columns that are biting him, and his passengers, to death."

"It is astounding that no one who wrote the MCAS software for the 737 Max seems even to have raised the possibility of using multiple inputs, including the opposite angle-of-attack sensor, in the computer’s determination of an impending stall."

"Boeing produced a dynamically unstable airframe, the 737 Max."

Other aircraft that are dynamically unstable (some jet fighters)
are equipped with ejection seats.

I cannot get the parallels between the 737 Max and the space shuttle Challenger out of my head. The Challenger accident, another textbook case study in normal failure, came about not because people didn’t follow the rules but *** because they did*** .