rjvehn

"But with the MCAS activated, said Fehrm, those breakout switches wouldn’t work. MCAS assumes the yoke is already aggressively pulled back and won’t allow further pullback to counter its action, which is to hold the nose down.

Fehrm’s analysis is confirmed in the instructions Boeing sent to pilots last weekend. The bulletin sent to American Airlines pilots emphasizes that pulling back the control column will not stop the action.

Fehrm said that the Lion Air pilots would have trained on 737 simulators and would have learned over many years of experience that pulling back on the yoke stops any automatic tail maneuvers pushing the nose down." [0].

If you bought a new computer, how pissed off would you be if you lost data not because of a hard-drive failure, but because of a weird design decision of the 1 penny caps lock key? Imagine spending the time to setup a proper RAID system and losing everything because of a design decision in the keyboard.

I mean if the media keeps reporting about the small stuff that's wrong, it's going to make people go "well planes are complex and things happen" and almost ignore the seriousness of a design decision that ignores user input.