I have a hard time believing the statement from the fine article that the presence of the MCAS system was unknown to the pilots. I'm not a pilot, just an interested spaceflight and aircraft enthusiast, and I know about that system. There is no way that the pilots did not.

Maybe the pilots did not receive proper sim time on a 737MAX, which I believe has different enough instrumentation and automation systems to require a separate sim from the standard 737. But they almost certainly knew which systems were on the plane, and how to operate them under normal conditions.

>Maybe the pilots did not receive proper sim time on a 737MAX, which I believe has different enough instrumentation and automation systems to require a separate sim from the standard 737

Isn't part of Boeing's marketing strategy that the 737MAX actually DOESN'T require additional training? The entire point of MCAS is to make the larger 737MAX react to control inputs just like a smaller 737, so flight crew can just fly them all "like a 737".

There were too many warnings already. That was the problem. More warning could not have helped. Instead, the fact that the pitot tube was inoperable should not have led to so many alarms, just one, and not an urgent one since the autopilot could have kept the throttle at its current setting. (Air speed is independent of land speed, and it's much more important to know the airspeed than the land speed, but wind speed is not going to fluctuate so much, so land speed can be used as a proxy for airspeed in that situation, and anyways there wasn't anything to be done about the lack of airspeed indication in that situation.)