That answers the "why didn't they remember the airworthiness notice" question - they did, and tried to disable it, and it re-enabled itself.
Glad I didn't pick up Boeing shares on the cheap just yet.
Glad I didn't pick up Boeing shares on the cheap just yet.
Unfortunately, it's a focus on profits over people that likely led to these disasters. I don't know how you can stop or dissuade from people making a buck off of a tragedy, but it might be worth putting our attention on the human element of this mess. Something about merging this safety issue with an opportunity to "buy low" and make some cash just doesn't sit right.
That said, in the FDA regulated industry, every change was signed by not only the engineer, but by the QA person, by the engineering manager, and by her. So in fairness to her, SHE would have been one of the people going to jail if the software told a doctor to take out the wrong kidney because of a bug in the calculation of an ortho normal basis or something. So I didn't blame her one bit.
No, the possibility that it reenabled itself is being investigated, but there's no reason to conclude that yet.
People form a version of events in their head and then cling to it for dear life. This whole thing should also serve as a reminder why we don't rely on internet mobs to investigate important things.
I'm more inclined to take it as a warning on regulatory capture, especially after it took most of the rest of the world grounding the craft to get the FAA to do so.
* disabled the trim motor
* realized they were unable to trim back to level flight without it, probably due to aerodynamic load on the stabilizer
* turned it back on
* MCAS was still enabled -- it can't be disabled directly -- and used the trim motor itself to nose-down more, making the situation unrecoverable.
Look at a six month graph, Boeing is trending up and the stock price is back to where it was at the end of January 2019. Yeah, gross.