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Likewise had Boeing designed a control surfaces system such that the pilot always has more control authority than the trim this also would not have happened.

I didn't say that MCAS wasn't the lions share root cause here. It's just not as simple as the "hurr durr, MCAS bad" that a lot of people keep trying to portray the more nuanced statements of various regulatory agencies as being equivalent to. MCAS might be bad but on an aircraft with a different trim system it wouldn't be "hurr durr" levels of bad.




Are there any airliners from any manufacturer where the pilot always has enough authority to override full trim?


Airbus just gives you a joystick with no force feedback at all. So yes ... but an entirely different philosophy. You tell the aircraft what you want it to do and it figures out how to do it. I suppose these recent events could be used as an argument against the idea of doing essentially fly by wire but then putting in a whole lot of extra stuff to make it seem that you are not doing fly by wire.


No, on Airbus the joystick still only moves the elevator, which has less control authority than the stabilizer, which is what trim controls.


It normally moves both as required. A good explanation here:

* https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/15268/how-does-...

Even if things degrade all the way down to "direct law" the pilot does not feel any aerodynamic force caused by the trim position.

We are talking about two different interpretations of the word "authority". In the case of the incidents, the pilots were physically unable to overcome the simulated force for an extended time.


Thanks for the correction! Reading about this brought me to:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XL_Airways_Germany_Flight_88...

with some similarities to the Ethiopian crash


I doubt this is possible. If it was it would be a certification requirement because it would make any trim runaway incident trivial.




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