Engineers who worked on the Boeing 737 MAX's flight control system, MCAS, which accident investigators have implicated in two deadly crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed a combined 346 people, omitted key safeguards that had been included in an earlier version of the same system that was used on a military tanker jet, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The engineers who designed the system for the military plane over 10 years ago reportedly made sure it relied on input from multiple sensors and limited power to move the plane's nose. One person familiar with the design said those checks were deliberate to prevent the system from acting erroneously or causing the pilot to lose control. "You don't want the solution to be worse than the initial problem," the person said.
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