Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report

As far as I know, MCAS has never activated in service due to actual high AoA. However, even the 737 classic could have "interesting" pitch up characteristics:

"The Boeing 737-300 was on approach to Bournemouth Airport following a routine passenger flight from Faro, Portugal. Early in the ILS approach the auto-throttle disengaged with the thrust levers in the idle thrust position. The disengagement was neither commanded nor recognised by the crew and the thrust levers remained at idle throughout the approach. Because the aircraft was fully configured for landing, the air speed decayed rapidly to a value below that appropriate for the approach. The commander took control and initiated a go-around. During the go-around the aircraft pitched up excessively; flight crew attempts to reduce the aircraft’s pitch were largely ineffective. The aircraft reached a maximum pitch of 44º nose-up and the indicated airspeed reduced to 82 kt. The flight crew, however, were able to recover control of the aircraft and complete a subsequent approach and landing at Bournemouth without further incident."

https://www.gov.uk/aaib-reports/aar-3-2009-boeing-737-3q8-g-...

If that had happened in a Max, without MCAS, would it have ended badly? We'll never know, but it seems possible.

In all fairness this plane is only a danger to its crew (and to regular commuters). Even without the software fix, the probability that you get into a crash in one of the few times in a year when you make a leg in this plane is still infinitesimal. For the crew that spends the whole year in there, different story.

I know better than to read between the lines on a press release like this, but can't help but notice that it falls far short of accepting responsibility for the problem.

He admits that MCAS "activated in response to erroneous angle of attack information" but doesn't admit that this alone directly resulted in the crashes. Rather, he implies that this sets off a chain of events which the pilots are unable to deal with ("pilots have told us, erroneous activation of the MCAS function can add to what is already a high workload environment") which puts undue blame on the pilots rather than the system.

If you'll excuse the analogy, it's as if they installed a new griddle in a restaurant kitchen which randomly gets ten times more hot than it ought to be, with no warning. The cook doesn't know it's too hot until the eggs start burning. Now the manager is saying that since the kitchen is so busy, the cook can't flip the eggs fast enough in response to these randomly fluctuating high temperature events. We're being told it's the cooks' fault.

I don't like being bullshitted and find this sort of dodgy language completely inappropriate when 300 people died.

Would you throw out your computer because of a bad hardware driver? This is effectively a software issue, that will eventually be solved

you just rename it I guess.

Like, Fly-by-wire is not new, airbus has been flying this way for 30 years, and had some bad early accidents because of it. The name of the system doesnt matter very much, so I fail to understand how the name would ground the airplane forever