Using computers to aid safety, to reduce pilot workload, that's all fine. But to use them to certify an airplane as having certain aerodynamic behaviors when they do not really have those behaviors? Perverse.
And further, the software routine under discussion can in effect be neutralized, easily, in-flight, by flipping two switches. Is it really acceptable, by Boeing and the FAA, to render an airplane legally unairworthy by flipping two switches? And even more damning, to me as a pilot, is they apparently found it acceptable to require no training for the true behavior of the airplane minus this augmentation that is easy to disable inflight and is in fact recommended to be disabled as a memory checklist item for certain kinds of emergencies?
Seriously what the fuck?
If true it is wrongdoing. It's wrong for Boeing to go down that road, it's wrong for the FAA to permit it - until the FARs are changed. There should be public hearings and all kinds of regulatory requirements for expected computer and software standards, failure rates, redundancies, and other guarantees. We have such guarantees in writing for the physical aerodynamics of the airplane! There absolutely should be equivalents for computers and software if they are somehow going to take up the slack for otherwise inadequate aircraft design. You don't just get to silently wordsmith everything and say oh this computer thingy here will satisfy the aerodynamic requirement.
Fucking hell. It makes me angry. And that's why I really hope there is a misunderstanding, that really the airplane is certifiable as airworthy without any computer augmentation, and that the problem is merely that the pilots were kept out of the loop to avoid type rating required difference training. That's bad enough. But I think it's worse to paper over aerodynamic short-comings, waiving it off with computer augmentation when not a single allowance for that is made in the FARs.