Boeing 737 Max set to return to U.S. skies after crashes

[sir pball]

7. Tech can't fix all problems, no, but Airbus' tech is arguably as flawed as Boeing's

It wasn't the fly-by-wire system itself that caused the junior pilot to fly 447 straight into the ocean with no mechanical issues (the frozen pitot tubes had resolved by then), but the alternate-law behavior of shutting down alarms when the flight data is no longer considered valid, was what arguably caused the guy to do it - he was instinctively cranking back on the stick as hard as he could, which of course is the exact wrong thing to do be it an A380 or Piper Cub. As soon as he'd drop the nose a degree, the angle of attack would drop back into the "valid" range, the warning would go off, and he'd yank back again - but rather than being alerted "the aircraft is in an attitude so extreme that the computers are borked", the stall warning would just shut off. Lather, rinse, repeat until you pancake into the Atlantic.

No, it's not an active fault in the system like an MCAS failure, but you'd think at some point somebody would have realized that a silent failure of important alarms MIGHT be a bad idea, even if it would only theoretically happen in a "don't fly like that" situation. Not to mention the unlinked controls, or the multiple OTHER alarms going off that drowned out the Dual Input warning. Point being, while Boeing did rather spectacularly hash up the implementation of MCAS (a single sensor, c'mon), now that it's been done properly it's no more flawed or dangerous than Airbus' fly-by-wire setup.