Your Self-Driving Car Will Be Programmed to Kill You—Deal With It

I can't argue with that. I'm not aware of anyone ever dying from falling - it's always that sudden stop at the fall's end.

To provide a serious answer, a stall sensor that relies on a single position sensor, and in response pitches the nose down so violently that the pilots lose control, sounds like a pretty serious software design flaw to me.

Did you hear that the software fix was delayed five weeks by the Trump Shutdown?

It should never have gone into production obviously.  What I do not understand is the 737 Max is the most powerful airframe Boeing has yet released.  It should be capable of a steeper climb than anything else in the fleet.  Why -- or how -- are pilots overtaxing it, causing the stall sensor to activate?

And another thing... I kept yelling at the radio/TV last week when the spokesmouth would say something like "unsafe aircraft" or "faulty design."  Yes, two of them crashed.  How many flights have been made successfully with this aircraft without incident?  There were 7,610 from February 12 to March 12 alone, probably 120,000 or more overall (first deliveries were in 2016).  A safety record of 99.99998% is pretty darn good.  I'd have no worries boarding one.

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Last year, commercial aircraft in the U.S. logged 18 million hours and 7.9 billion miles in the air without a fatal incident

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A preliminary KNKT report said the crew of Air Lion Flight 610 struggled to override the plane's automatic systems in the minutes before it plunged into the ocean. The system pulled the plane's nose down more than two dozen times, the report said.

Two dozen times, oh my. The pilots must have been terrified.