This immediately struck me as completely negligent insanity. The thought of flying on a commercial airliner with no inherent stability, akin to a fighter jet, is horrifying to me. How this got past regulators is just mindblowing.
What hysteria. Relaxed static stability, or some degree of longitudinal static instability (not the same as "no inherent stability") is one potential option for reducing fuel consumption and emissions in future aircraft configurations (as correctly pointed out by multiple commenters, the 737 Max is not designed this way). To what degree that's safe depends on how the artificial stability is maintained in the presence of individual and common-mode failures. For a long time, orthodoxy and knee-jerk thinking precluded long-range transport on only two engines, or fly-by-wire, or primarily composite airframes. With decades of engineering and actual data behind them, these have now become standard.
Michael Crichton's Airframe treats this kind of knee-jerk thinking, and the dangers inherent in using terms like "stability" that have a huge gap between laypersons' perception and engineers' understanding.
> MCAS is “activated without pilot input” and “commands nose down stabilizer to enhance pitch characteristics during step turns with elevated load factors and during flaps up flight at airspeeds approaching stall.
> Since it operates in situations where the aircraft is under relatively high g load and near stall, a pilot should never see the operation of MCAS.
In other words, the aircraft does not need MCAS for stability during flight in anything but exceptional circumstances. Normal flights should never have MCAS active.
This is not remotely similar to the aerodynamics of a fighter jet.
MCAS is a software mechanism designed to prevent stalls in extreme circumstances that can be overridden with the same method used to disable auto trim on previous models of the 737. The A320 has software to prevent phugiod motion in exceptional scenarios, except the A320's mechanism cannot be overridden by the pilot.
I don't care if you choose to never fly on a plane again, but don't spread this misinformed hysteria.