According to Southwest Airlines, the biggest operators of this plane, you’re wrong. It wasn’t even in the manual.
“The existence of the MCAS system caught pilots and their labor unions off guard, intensifying the scrutiny on the aircraft in the wake of the October 29 crash in Indonesia that killed everyone aboard. The system isn’t mentioned in the flight crew operations manual (FCOM) that governs the master description of the aircraft for pilots and is the basis for Southwest’s airline documentation and training.
The Southwest Q&A asks Why?
“Since it operates in situations where the aircraft is under relatively high g load and near stall, a pilot should never see the operation of MCAS. As such, Boeing did not include an MCAS description in its FCOM.” The explainer continues: “In this case, MCAS will trim nose as designed to assist the pilot during recover, likely going unnoticed by the pilot.”
There is another explanation, according to a Tuesday report in The Wall Street Journal: “One high-ranking Boeing official said the company had decided against disclosing more details to cockpit crews due to concerns about inundating average pilots with too much information — and significantly more technical data — than they needed or could digest.””
