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AOA failures happen on other aircraft. It's not common, but it happens. It's not generally fatal. What we have here is a critical flight control system dependent on one specific AOA sensor.
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I think it's clear the design of the MCAS software was poor. Boeing is now working on a software update to fix it.
And it's also clear that there is something wrong with two AOA failures, indeed three, months apart. (The lion Air jet had an AOA failure two flights before the fatal crash flight and that that sensor was replaced.)
There's a long way to go before we know everything that went wrong in the chain of events that led to each crash. But these two things we do know need attention.
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I've written about concerns over changes Boeing is making to its Quality Assurance system, including reducing the number of quality inspectors. This has caused concern not only about jobs but about the quality of the oversight.
See these two stories:
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I wouldn't say it's a myth, but one narrative that has gained ground on social media is that because Boeing added this software flight control that the MAX must be an inherently unstable airframe and that Boeing merely slapped a software "band-aid" on it. In other words, this plane is doomed to fail.
I don't believe this is true. Using software to adjust the flight characteristics of a modern jet is not unusual. When Boeing flight tested the latest version of its 747 jumbo jet, the 747-8, it found wing flutter (excessive vibration caused by resonance) in certain flight conditions. A Boeing engineer called Pio Fitzgerald won Engineer of the Year when he came up with a fix. The fix was software that detected the slightest onset of flutter on the wings and made the flaps and ailerons move slightly to counter it. Problem solved. No hardware. Just software. There's nothing unstable about the 747.
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