Finding MH370
1 min readSep 23, 2019

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Robert, You raise an interesting point: if MCAS was so dangerous, why didn’t more planes crash? The answer is the that the danger would only manifest in a small subset of circumstances — most notably, when one of the angle-of-attack sensors was faulty. Even when the fault manifested, as you point out, a skilled pilot could figure out how to wrestle the plane back onto the ground. But a system doesn’t need to be 100% deadly 100% of the time to be unacceptably dangerous. The goal of the FAA is to achieve a zero percent accident rate; to reach that, planes must be built without any hidden gotchas, even ones that will kill only the bottom 10 percent of pilots.

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Finding MH370
Finding MH370

Written by Finding MH370

Jeff Wise is science journalist who lives near New York City. He is the author of “The Taking of MH370” and "Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger."

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