Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
These attempts to rewrite history to fit a narrative happen all the time. For example, I see constant attempts to deny that the Wrights&#x27; 1903 Flyer was the first powered, controlled flight. The evidence presented is always a pile of fanciful conjecture.<p>This rewrite occurs with modern events, too. For example, the narrative on the 737MAX crashes. I&#x27;ve posted about it here many times. On a recent trip, I ran into a 737-800 captain on layover, and struck up a conversation. I chided him a bit about remembering the stab trim cutoff switch. Well, that opened the floodgates. He told me in no uncertain terms that those accidents would have never happened to him, because he knew how to fly the 737. He told me one way they could have recovered the airplane was the one I mentioned here many times - trim to normal and turn off the stab trim system. He said there was another way. The EA airplane was operating at <i>full throttle</i>. The overspeed warning could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder. The pilots ignored it. Overspeed is a very dangerous situation, as the air loads on the airplane exceed design limits. All the pilots had to do was just pull the throttle back. Then they could have manually retrimmed the stabilizer, which they tried to but could not because of the overspeed.<p>He added that all the 737 pilots he knew knew about this, but were afraid to speak up.<p>Remember all the narrative about the pilots could not have diagnosed stab trim runaway? This infuriated him, because when the trim runs, it spins two wheels right by the pilots&#x27; knees, making a loud and unmistakable clack-clacking sound. Something I was told about by Boeing engineers, but it was nice to hear it from a captain.<p>I suspect that the reason the single point of failure design of the MCAS went through is Boeing simply assumed that the pilots would just turn off the stab trim system if it misbehaved. And this is exactly what happened in the first MCAS incident - the crew turned it off, and continued the flight normally and landed safely.