Why single out southwest specifically in this hypothetical scenario? If any airline seems 'people focused' I'd think it would be them..
This allows them to save on maintenance costs since there's so much commonality among their fleet, but puts them in more peril when something affects the entire class of craft.
'we should label these switches like this and put them here', and southwest said,
'no, that will change the type and we will have to retrain pilots, we'd rather have things be the same type with an asterisks and just let our pilots know than retrain'
And because southwest is the largest consumer of the 8max, Boeing did it. From what I understand, that was a precondition of sale for the contract.
And the result it seems is that the plane can act in a way that is confusing to people who are expecting one behavior and seeing another, this comes right down to labeling switches as one thing, when they are kinda another.
My assumption, and this will probably be borne out in the investigation, is that, because southwest was part of the decision process here, they are at very little risk because of a little additional lite pilot training where they point out these switches are labeled wrong and this behavior will seem funny but this is what it's going to do. But not all airlines are going to train like that, it's the same type right?
either way, a customer requesting a design change doesn't make the customer part of the 'decision process' - customers request changes to the vendor, who then decides whether or not the change makes sense, and if necessary tries to influence customer expectations or at worst lose the business if necessary if it does not.
If Boeing had a reasonable expectation that the avionics changes for the new jets would impact flight characteristics to the point that the pilots needed to be retrained, then they should have dealt accordingly, even if this meant sticking to the original design you claim and insisting southwest 'suck it up' as far as pilot retraining, and the decision not to do this, if true, was solely theirs to make.
also, this wouldn't explain the 'buggy avionics software relying on a single sensor' which could also be part of the equation as I understand it.
> Southwest operates a fleet of more than 750 Boeing 737s, and the 34 737 MAX 8 aircraft account for less than five (5) percent of our daily flights.