What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?

You are absolutely, 100% on the money. Got it in one.

The entire MCAS fiasco was born out of deadlines and deliveries at at all costs, sound engineering be damned.

The entire thing was very specifically orchestrated in such a way as to minimize the chances that any external authorities or pilots would ask any inconvenient questions.

His central thesis in this article might be:

Boeing became the world’s pre-eminent commercial airplane manufacturer in part because it developed a coherent design philosophy that relied on pilots’ airmanship as the last line of defense.

And that's come up before in various discussions like Langewiesche's. And here I'll underscore this article is a discussion, it's not an analysis. He does bring in myriad relevant factors like airline's being cheap, foolhardy, downright wreckless at times, literally expecting pilots to paper over their decisions. I think that is a real problem all airlines have to contend with, but the safest airlines have mostly solved it, and the least safe airlines still struggle with it and it's mostly about systemic corruption, not pilot incompetency. It's just that if you don't have particularly skilled and experienced pilots all of the time, you're playing roulette - you don't have your last line of defense all of the time. Eventually, things aren't going to work out well. And on that part of the discussion, I agree with him.

You are trying to hold pilots accountable in some vague sense, so what of holding Boeing and the FAA accountable in a non-vague sense? How is the actual delivered form of MCAS reasonable? How do you expect, given available factual flight data from both flights, MCAS induced mistrim to be avoided? Do you agree that it must be avoided at the low altitudes both of these flights were at, because it's not possible to recover from mistrim at low altitude?

If this were just about pilot training and certification, why are these airplanes grounded around the world? You really think the problem is just with a handful of "3rd world" pilots? Do you even realize that the Ethiopian Airlines pilot was one of their most experienced, and this experience as a fighter pilot is demonstrated in his recovery attempts shown in the flight data?

I mean, it's almost like some people don't know what they're talking about, yet call their nonsensical prattle "the truth" because they enjoy trying to aggravate thinking people, quite possibly the only actual skill they have.

This is utter nonsense that you either made up or obtained from some unreliable source. It is categorically false.

The third pilot in the jump seat "rescued" the Lion Air accident aircraft on the previous flight by simply telling the pilots to disengage the stabilizer trim. This "rescued" aircraft continued 600 miles safely to Jakarta.

You know nothing and yet you have opinions, and this is now universally accepted. You are therefore easily manipulated by those who would blame Boeing instead of the gross and egregious negligence of the pilots, those who trained them, the airline owners and executives, and the market conditions that forced Boeing to make decisions in good faith that incorrectly assumed a level of pilot competency that did not exist.

In the words of the Air France 447 pilot just before he died from his own gross incompetence, “[Expletive], we’re dead.” And in this, I am referring to the human species.