
American Airlines extends Boeing 737 MAX cancellations through August 19 - howard941
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-airplane-american-air-idUSKCN1RQ0FL
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godson_drafty
There's the reassurances about the broken and deadly MCAS system. But what is
there to assure us about the engineering team within Boeing that allowed such
an egregiously bad system to be put into production and hidden from regulators
and pilots? Here is a system that exercises full control authority over the
entire extent of the plane's horizontal stabilizer, so much that it cannot be
overridden manually, and is controlled by a single sensor that alternates
every other flight. Management then hid this system from airlines and the FAA.
How can they show that the individuals within Boeing that created such an
atrocity have been corrected, and that the same clowns did not engineer any
other surprises into the aircraft?

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danielfoster
Hopefully this will give regulators time to check every aspect of the plane
(not just MCAS) for safety.

Unfortunately 737 Max operators will be stretched thin and this will have
ripple effects for everyone. Trip to Miami 30% more expensive? Flight
cancelled but no alternatives until tomorrow? At least for American flyers,
you can bet it's because there are fewer seats available and less capacity in
the network overall.

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akimball
Will they check the stability of the airframe design? I ask because I read
that the software was created to compensate for using dangerous forward weight
placement to accommodate oversized engines without undertaking the expense of
designing a new airframe. If that were true, it would indicate to me that
Boeing knew in advance that they were selling a dangerous aircraft. I can't
imagine that software tweaks would suffice to make it fit for human flight in
that case.

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sgent
The airframe according to reports has some stability issues at the edge of its
flight envelope. That could have been resolved by requiring additional
simulator training for pilots -- but Boeing chose the MCAS system to avoid the
cost, and the revenue hit (reportedly $1million / plane by Southwest alone).

