And the article explicitly dings Southwest Airlines as having provided Boeing a financial incentive to avoiding them needing additional simulator training.
The in-cockpit notification light, "AOA Disagree," was a paid upgrade [1].
I don't know what the article is on about.
[1] https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/boeing-bosses-una...
b. The AoA indicator is a paid upgrade.
c. In most 737 MAX's, the disagree alert did not function correctly (did not function as they supposedly intended) unless you bought the paid upgrade for the indicator.
d. Neither the alert nor indicator were considered safety equipment, they were considered advisory.
e. If the alert indicates a caution or warning, it's going to be listed in the flight manual, and decently likely a procedure for understanding and handling that condition must exist, and if so it's going to be a part of a training regimen, the very thing airlines wanted to avoid.
The two changes already planned: decoupling the disagree alert and angle indicator. Upon disagreement, MCAS is disabled. That means the disagree alert is at least cautionary now, because it means the airplane's stall behavior will be different than other 737s. That absolutely will require simulator training for pilots.
One of the most central questions is whether the assessment that the disagree alert was not "safety equipment" was wrong. That MCAS, in an angle of attack disagree condition, can so quickly induce, entirely on its own, catastrophic mistrim at low altitude, is rather damning. It suggests the risk assessment process is flawed.
The sentence after "This alteration created a shift in the plane’s center of gravity pronounced enough that it raised a red flag when the MAX was still just a model plane about the size of an eagle, running tests in a wind tunnel" marks a bloc of technically sloppy oversimplification.
That criticism noted, I couldn't materially fault anything else in the writing and in fact I learned some things about my own industry. On the whole, it is a really valuable piece that I will be sharing with my colleagues.
Yes, exactly: that's the point. Yes, a lot of technical detail is left out, but the average lay person doesn't care about the technical detail. They just want the bottom line. And as someone who has spent quite a bit of time digging into the technical details, I have a hard time quarreling with the language this author chose to describe the bottom line. This is not a case of "well, it's complicated". This really is a simple case at bottom: an unthinkably stupid system, a product of a frighteningly common managerial and corporate outlook, killed everyone on board two airplanes. And the author wants that to raise alarm bells in every reader's mind--so that maybe those readers will start wondering whether letting such a system continue unrestrained is a good idea.