No. The MAX is basically a boring old design that's been flying safely for decades, and it is perfectly stable. The only problem was a small handling issue that appeared at very steep climbs because of the new engines. And because they wanted to keep the same type certificate, the MAX had to handle exactly the same as the "old" 737, so they introduces MCAS to adjust the "maneuvering characteristics" automatically. Which was so badly designed that it led to the crashes. So the problem is not with the basic 737 design, the problem is that the new MCAS was much worse than the problem it was supposed to fix.
Was thought to be perfectly stable. Turns out it wasn't, in their new edition.
> problem is that the new MCAS was much worse
It's common in airplane industry to never blame users nor the instruments, but the process. Things should be able to fail, and pilots should be able to recover. Now both Boeing and the FAA failed catastrophically in their certification process, leading to missing vital information about the MCAS.
Overall the core problem wasn't the MCAS but the process (or lack of process) that didn't find out the edge-cases where it didn't work.
As with most aviation accidents, you always have a chain of things that have to fail. If memory serves, any one of the following would probably have prevented the accidents:
- if Boeing would have designed MCAS better
- if anyone inside Boeing or the FAA would have flagged the bad design before the accidents
