So, the other two 37 MAXs of an earlier variant that crashed a few years ago due to basically malfunctioning autopilot?

The first one crashed because this new autopilot subsystem was present on the plane, and the Pilots did not even know it existed.

Boeing specifically told the airline that bought the plane that new training for the new MAX variant would not be necessary, because /that would cost more and make the airline less likely to buy the new variant/.

Turns out it was necessary, as the Pilots had no idea the system existed, it engaged, and as they tried everything that would work on a plane without that system to disengage it, the system they did not know about essentially fought them until the aircraft entered an unrecoverable state.

The second MAX variant that crashed a few years ago of course also had this same system. But now Boeing was actually mandating airlines train the pilots on this system.

The system engaged, malfunctioned, and the pilots followed the training from Boeing to basically handle the situation they were in, … and, despite following the procedures outlined from Boeings training… their procedure /did not work/, and this aircraft also crashed.

I do not understand how Boeing executives are not in prison at this point.

EDIT: Technically this system I am referring to is not an ‘autopilot’ as that kind of system generally refers to something that maintains course and heading, while this new system was … ironically enough, a stall recovery/warning/prevention system, but for the lay person, any process that overrides a pilots ability to manually control the orientation and airspeed of an aircraft is generally thought of as an ‘autopilot’.

The problem that keeps cropping up is that this system revolves around pitot tubes, basically little holes that measure the rate of air flowing through them. This gives you your airspeed.

Unless the pitot tubes ice up, as often happens.

Then, the system believes you have a very low airspeed and tells the craft to dive, to gain airspeed to prevent a stall.

And because of the way this system is implemented (if you pilots are even aware it exists), it is pretty confusing and complicated to disengage it /while your aircraft has suddenly entered into a likely panic inducing, likely unrecoverable dive for no apparent reason/.

Problem: if the pitot tube is frozen… indicated airspeed will never go up, and the system will not stop telling the aircraft to dive until you figure out how to turn it off.

As you can imagine, Pilots do not have much time to do this in an aircraft diving at an extreme angle, and unlike with fighter jets or in movies, large commercial aircraft take a lot of time to safely recover from an extreme dive without ripping the wings off from pulling up to hard or at too high an airspeed.

So the pilots basically go from ‘everything is fine’ to ‘aircraft is now diving at an extreme angle, time to remember and execute an exact amd complex operation of checking all indicators and toggling switches in perfect correct order’ in a couple of seconds, all while the in flight manuals for executing this procedure are flying about the cabin, stewardesses are tumbling around the aircraft and all of the passengers are screaming.