This I was never worried about. These days if you make it cheap, people will fly on it. Last time customers really balked was the glorious DC-10 and back in those days flying actually cost real money and there was some sense of customer service in the business. Make these MAX flights $10 cheaper than whatever WN or Allegiant or Spirit charge and people will forget all concerns.

Pilot error was not the root cause of these accidents. The fundamental error was Boeing’s: they designed, tested, certified and delivered an airplane with an undocumented fatal flaw. That flaw was MCAS. It was a single-path system with a catastrophically-lethal failure mode. MCAS violated the “Prime Directive” of airliner design: a single failure must NEVER EVER cause the loss of an airplane

Whether or not the LionAir and Ethiopian pilots could have regained control of their aircraft is irrelevant. Those dives never should have happened. A single failure caused each dive, ending 346 lives. That was Boeing’s fault. Not because of deliberate malice, but because of stupid negligence.

Someday, all those responsible for the design, implementation and approval of this system may become known. Can they be held criminally liable? Let the courts decide. In the meantime, they must live with their guilt.

It will take several years for the MAX program to recover – if ever. As for Boeing’s decades-old reputation as the source of the world’s best airliners? No one knows.

Maybe never.

Of course they did outsource some of the code to India to save money, and based on what I know about the programming industry, the quality of code that comes back from there tends to be subpar.

That is why you need your coders to live and breath your field so if they see a design spec with

“Read in AOA data from AOA_0”

They automatically think

“What if the sensor goes bad? Oh we have multiple sensors… what if they disagree, maybe take an average? Alert the pilots and disengage?”

“Hmm we have multiple sensors

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/05/boeing-737-max-crash-reveals-a-severe-problem-with-older-boeing-737-ngs.html

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/20/737_max_flight_simulators_not_accurate_report/

From what I recall reading, there is a runaway-trim on an NG approximately every 150,000 flight-hours, so there must have been some actual manual-trims.

In the sim, when the stick was pulled back to raise the nose, the trim-wheel couldn’t be turned (budged). They had to release back-pressure on the yoke.

In the NG sim, they lost 7,000 feet of altitude during the roller-coaster method of trim-wheel manual-trimming.

So, if you’re unlucky enough to be in an NG, with a runaway-trim incident below 7,000′ AGL, it’s probably game-over. Same problem with the MAX, but either runaway-trim or erroneous MCAS activation.

What’s the odds of a runaway-trim, below 7,000′ AGL, on an NG ???

The manual wheel trim issue is very thorny, from what I’ve read. Apparently, they made the manual trim wheels smaller for both the NG and the Max, so there’s a question of if they are even useful at all. Second, it seems the simulator does not simulate actual conditions when it comes to wheel operation; rendering it easier than it actually is to operate. Apparently, this is a problem for both the NG and the Max. Has anyone manually trimmed an NG or Max outside of a simulator?

https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-indonesia-lion-air-ethiopian-airlines-managerial-revolution

Nail. Head. Hit!

Most aircraft have historically looked better when they are first stretched – and there's something in the meme that says if it looks good it will fly good.

But as you observe, Patrick, there comes a point when keeping an old design in the air by bolting more into it to save the enormous costs of creating a new aircraft gets iffy and the Max certainly fits into that category.

It is particularly relevant when the aerodynamics are compromised as in this case.

A stretch that went extremely well was the -747, whereby an old and tested airframe and much of the systems were updated by incorporating digital instrumentation without significant changes to the flight characteristics – you'd have thought Boeing would have learnt from that success.