The author should stick to software and stay out of airframes.

>I’ll say it again: In the 737 Max, the engine nacelles themselves can, at high angles of attack, work as a wing and produce lift. And the lift they produce is well ahead of the wing’s center of lift, meaning the nacelles will cause the 737 Max at a high angle of attack to go to a higher angle of attack. This is aerodynamic malpractice of the worst kind.

>Apparently the 737 Max pitched up a bit too much for comfort on power application as well as at already-high angles of attack. It violated that most ancient of aviation canons and probably violated the certification criteria of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

Pure bullshit. Many low wing passenger aircraft have this tendency somewhere in their flight envelope. You can tone it down with some aerodynamic trickery but it's just a fundamental trade-off you get when the engines are below and forward of the wing, the load is above the wing and you pin the throttle. The reason we got ht MAX debacle was because the new 737 had this tendency to a degree and in a portion of the flight envelope different than the old 737 which meant it couldn't ride on the old 737's cert without a bandage over that. The 737 MAX8 handles perfectly reasonably for an airborne bus. What it does not do is handle perfectly reasonably for a 737-800 hence the reason they overlaid half baked software taking inputs from less than adequate hardware systems (well they were adequate for the less critical systems they were designed to feed into).

>Let’s review what the MCAS does: It pushes the nose of the plane down when the system thinks the plane might exceed its angle-of-attack limits; it does so to avoid an aerodynamic stall.

No. It (when it's no malfunctioning and trying to put you in a dive) pushes the nose down when you're getting into the portions of the flight envelope where the MAX flies differently than the old 737 in order to fudge the same handling as the old 737 thereby skating by on the old cert.

Big disasters require many small things to go just right. If the software was more robust this wouldn't have happened. If the hardware was more robust this wouldn't have happened. If the UX had been compatible with the pilots existing knowledge this wouldn't have happened. If the airlines were willing to pony up for type certs this wouldn't have happened. If the FAA had been hard asses this wouldn't have happened. To play it off as "Boeing tried to fix a bad plane with software and failed, whoopies" is exactly the kind of naive surface level postmortem that results in nothing being learned and these kinds of failures happening again. I know that opinions that deviate from "software engineers are angels that never do anything wrong and corporate is the devil also those hardware guys gave the software guys a crap situation to deal with" is not going to be appreciated on HN but the fact of the matter is that any one of the five-ish parties here (FAA, customers, and engineering, software and management within Boeing) could have broken this chain resulting in a different outcome and to prevent future events like this we need to understand the decisions that happened at the margin that prevented the chain of events from being broken.