If MCAS is turned off, the pilots will find themselves to be flying an entirely different plane.
When you abstract away interaction with reality, you cannot avoid introducing a process that mediates between a pilot’s action and the actual actions of the plane.
The behavior of the real plane will depend on the environment that it is in.
The behavior of a virtual plane will depend on just the working sensors that are available to render the virtual simulation.
Level 5 automation requires a kind of intelligence that is aware of what sensors are faulty and furthermore is able to navigate a problem with partial and unobserved information.
The smarts to enable this kind of Artificial Intelligence is simply not available in our current state of technological development.
In short, Boeing has decided to implement technology that is simply too ambitious.
Not all software has the same level of complexity.
This is not an issue of insufficient testing to uncover logical flaws in the software.
This is not an issue of robustly handling sensor and equipment failure.
This is an issue of attempting to implement an overly ambitious and thus a dangerous solution.
Air travel is extremely reliable, but introducing software patches as a means to virtualize physical behavior can lead to unintended consequences.
The reason that we still fly planes with pilots in them is that we expect pilots to be able to solve unexpected situations that automation cannot handle.
MCAS like virtualization, handcuffs pilots from differentiating between the real and the simulated.
I would thus recommend to regulators that in the future, MCAS like virtualization should be treated and tested very differently from other automation.
They should be treated as Level 5 automation with a more exhaustive level of scrutiny.
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