In this case I imagine someone at Boeing knew moving the elevator jack 2.5 degrees based on one sensor was unsafe hence them selling an optional upgrade that made the system safe. That seems kind of criminal.
But to me it currently looks like it's largely a problem of how the different systems interact and how it's communicated to the users aka pilots. That's something one should be able to spot from the flowcharts/blueprints or whatever they have to document system integration.
This was, in my opinion, one of the most disgusting aspects of this whole sordid story. They had to cut back after the Ethiopian crash, but blaming everybody else seems a big part of their DNA.
I read somewhere that the sensor was misreading by 20° and Lion should have noticed.
Should Boeing have shipped the system with a single point of failure by default? Probably not.
Should the FAA have raised questions about that? Probably.
Should Boeing have considered a test case where a pilot didn't know about MCAS? Probably. But we don't know that they didn't. Perhaps they did and their test pilots recovered the plane in time. That would make it a Lion Air training failure.
There's no single point of blame here, but thankfully the airline industry reacts as a whole to incidents like this and takes as many steps as possible to make sure it doesn't happen any more.
Well, how could they train for it, when Boieing conveniently hushed over such a significant change, because it was commercially expedient? Until the Lion Air crash the airlines and their pilots didn't even know that such a system is in place.
According to an AA pilot the entire training consisted of less than an hour presentation on an iPad, in which the new behavior wasn't mentioned at all.
Add to that that Boeing offered a paid upgrade which at least would make pilots aware that the system malfunctions.
This paid upgrade sounds a bit like "Nice plane you have here, would be a shame if it crashes"
No matter how you look at it: Boeing displayed despicable behavior in this whole sorry mess. Behavior which comes back now to bite them badly.
I don't disagree with your reasoning, for what it's worth. I just think there really should be a special place in hell for the Boeing executives who allowed this to happen. Especially after the first crash.
From what is reported about the Lion Air crash it sounds like the pilots may not have sorted out what the stabilizer trim was set to and what to do to correct it. Hopefully that is not the case as such a situation would be a glaring problem with pilot competence.
This case being "pilots untrained and unfamiliar with the MCAS system recovering from a catastrophic systems failure / error".
They are at fault no matter what though from straying from their long held principle that the pilot has the final say on control of the aircraft. Inputs from the yoke and throttle levers should always supercede the computer.
Nobody in either the article or this train of comments has suggested that it was unreasonable to assume pilot error after a single crash. The problem is the oversight process which allowed it to be certified in the first place.
The airline industry isn't responsibly reacting, they're reacting after trying for quite some time to ignore the problem because it's becoming increasingly obvious that they and the FAA have been horrendously negligent, and ignoring it isn't working anymore.