Iceman wrote:Certification requirement, a bit like a stick shaker for an impending stall.
Iceman
I’m not sure that’s correct, and certainly not to the speed and magnitude to which it could operate.
From wiki
On the Boeing 737 MAX, MCAS was intended to mimic pitching behavior similar to aircraft in the previous generation of the series, the Boeing 737 NG...
During the certification of the MAX in 2017, Boeing removed a description of MCAS from the flight manuals, leaving pilots unaware of the system when the airplane entered service.[1][2] The Wall Street Journal reported that Boeing had failed to share information about that issue for "about a year" before the crash of Lion Air Flight 610.[3] Twelve days after the Lion Air accident, on November 10, 2018, Boeing publicly revealed MCAS in a message to airline operators, noting that the system operates "without pilot input."[4][5] A recovery procedure highlighted by Boeing and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) after the Lion Air accident failed to prevent another accident: Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. Before that crash, the FAA anticipated that Boeing would deliver a software update to MCAS by April 2019.[6][7] Boeing admitted that the MCAS played a role in both accidents and asserted that MCAS is not an anti-stall system.
I thought it was a system introduced purely to prevent any requirement for ‘expensive’ conversion to that series of 737? It was a cost saving item that turned out to be rather costly.
Indeed the only ‘certification standard’ Boeing were concerned with was to limit conversion training for NG pilots to level B. But to achieve that they couldn’t even describe MCAS as a ‘new’ or ‘novel’ system to the 737.
That’s why they hid it away as simply an extension of the NG’s Speed Trim System. But it wasn’t!
If it was a certification requirement, why would they hide it from pilots and operators?