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Originally Posted by maurice
... and perhaps even better would have been if they had not been confronted by a problem that should not have existed.
...it appears that the plane was not fully airworthy.
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The list of aircraft with flaws is as long as the list of aircraft, period. Some flaws are worse than others. Some flaws show up sooner than others. Things break and as a pilot I personally disagree with this analysis.
Almost any aircraft with an autopilot has serious potential problems, which is why aircraft have over-rides, circuit breakers and manual systems. Even my lowly photo-ship Cardinal that has a wing-leveler has a way to kill the automation by pulling a circuit breaker.
In my opinion, Boeing's biggest mistake was their egregious break from tradition of being "pilots" first aircraft vs. Airbus trying to make pilots monitors. That was the biggest complaint from US airline pilots about the MAX if you read the reports carefully. The pilots felt like they should have known more about the system then was included in the manuals, and that's a bigger problem than the hardware / software problem. You can't fix what you don't understand how to over-ride.
And this is another reason I do NOT want to be on a plane being flown remotely, or with AI / system as primary. I'm old school and I believe good training and redundancy of well-trained crewmembers is the best system we've got.
Remember, all of those union pilots could have said yeah, ground it. We all want to go home tonight, we all want to land safely with the lives of those behind us...
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Irrespective of the training and experience of it's crew
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That's the crucial point, though. The US crews that did experience similar situations had training that led to better outcomes, and that was the pilots and union's recommendation for the MAX issue as well. It's kind of being overlooked, but the first 737MAX crash the plane had the SAME problem the previous day and was saved by an off-duty crewmember who recognized the problem and correctly worked out the solution:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/20/lion...sh-report.html I'd listen to the pilots flying the airplane with their souls in the cockpit before I listened to people with political axes to grind - which is what is happening here in my opinion.