What I'm hearing from the pilot's perspective makes them sound somewhat isolated from the design choices, and even the design information. That doesn't seem like a good thing, we'd like to imagine the people who have to fly the plane having a lot of input into its design and certainly complete information about its design. But it sounds more like something that engineers foisted onto the pilots, framed as being for their own good, without necessarily really telling them why and how to deal with it. Is it possible that this is due to a sense that certain aspects of the MAX needed to be concealed from the pilots to mitigate objections?
The reason I ask is because If I were an engineer being tugged in several different directions in my design choices, on the one hand wanting to make a plane that pilots like to fly while on the other hand meeting various profit-related specs, I might find myself tempted to conceal from both sides of those conflicting interests some of the tradeoffs going on. Would I hesitate to tell the executives who see the corporate bottom line that the plane could fly cheaper if I just made it harder on the pilots? Would I hesitate to tell the pilots that the plane could be made easier to fly but it would cost more? If I'm tempted to conceal that kind of information, it could lead me to design systems to help compensate for the tradeoffs in ways that I am not fully forthcoming about. Could this dynamic be playing a role in the design of the MAX and the MCAS? If so, it might explain why some pilots are saying things like "why isn't this in the manual?"
