Problems usually happen in isolation. Your dataset is skewed because you've read a bunch of accident reports. When there are multiple failures together, this is much more likely to lead to an accident. When there's just a single problem and it's handled with no loss of life, they don't write a report about it.
I agree, the stick shaker gets a pilot's attention. What the stick shaker tells the pilot is that he's about to stall, but that's not what was happening. Shaking the stick is loudly yelling false information at the pilot!
Let's look at the epistemology here. If we're only looking at the two AoA indicators, and one reads 5 degrees and the other reads 25 degrees, we know that there has been a sensor failure. All you can say that the airplane does not know what its angle of attack is. That's fine though, we've been flying planes for a hundred years without AoA indicators, even ones that had way worse pitch instabilities than the 737MAX. If the airplane doesn't know the angle of attack, there is no reason for it to activate the stick shaker, put in nose down trim, or do anything else except to calmly notify the pilots that AoA is unavailable and therefore MCAS is disabled. All the pilots need to do then is fly the plane normally and not do any crazy banked turns or extremely abrupt pullups at low speed. It's definitely wrong for the plane to start dialing in nose down trim "just in case", because the "just in case" can kill you if it's not necessary!
On AF447, there were as usual, a lot of mistakes made. One problem clearly though was that the plane was giving the pilots a lot of conflicting information that confused them. If the plane was seeing three different airspeeds, the best thing for it to do would have been to put a big red X over the airspeed tape and let them fly by pitch and power. This is exactly why a lot of instrument pilots in older smaller planes carry a little instrument cover. If say your AI fails in IMC, you don't want to see the wrong indication at all, so you cover it up and use your other instruments. Seeing a wrong indication, even if you know it's wrong is very confusing and can lead people to make errors in reasoning, especially in a stressful situation.
Problems usually happen in isolation. Your dataset is skewed because you've read a bunch of accident reports. When there are multiple failures together, this is much more likely to lead to an accident. When there's just a single problem and it's handled with no loss of life, they don't write a report about it.
I agree, the stick shaker gets a pilot's attention. What the stick shaker tells the pilot is that he's about to stall, but that's not what was happening. Shaking the stick is loudly yelling false information at the pilot!
Let's look at the epistemology here. If we're only looking at the two AoA indicators, and one reads 5 degrees and the other reads 25 degrees, we know that there has been a sensor failure. All you can say that the airplane does not know what its angle of attack is. That's fine though, we've been flying planes for a hundred years without AoA indicators, even ones that had way worse pitch instabilities than the 737MAX. If the airplane doesn't know the angle of attack, there is no reason for it to activate the stick shaker, put in nose down trim, or do anything else except to calmly notify the pilots that AoA is unavailable and therefore MCAS is disabled. All the pilots need to do then is fly the plane normally and not do any crazy banked turns or extremely abrupt pullups at low speed. It's definitely wrong for the plane to start dialing in nose down trim "just in case", because the "just in case" can kill you if it's not necessary!
On AF447, there were as usual, a lot of mistakes made. One problem clearly though was that the plane was giving the pilots a lot of conflicting information that confused them. If the plane was seeing three different airspeeds, the best thing for it to do would have been to put a big red X over the airspeed tape and let them fly by pitch and power. This is exactly why a lot of instrument pilots in older smaller planes carry a little instrument cover. If say your AI fails in IMC, you don't want to see the wrong indication at all, so you cover it up and use your other instruments. Seeing a wrong indication, even if you know it's wrong is very confusing and can lead people to make errors in reasoning, especially in a stressful situation.