Certainly the 737 Max is safer now that the MCAS software has been changed. However, to say that this is now the safest airplane because of all this scrutiny is just not true, simply on the basis of the obsolete system for the pitch trim, which has only one electric motor. We're talking about relying on human muscles as a backup to a single electric motor, while all other aircraft have at least two. Some even have three.
I would not get on this aircraft. Why should I subject myself unnecessarily to a higher risk level than on other comparable aircraft? That's basically what's happening here. The grandfathering has been stretched too much.
The final report is not out yet for the second crash, but the interim report has shown quite extensively that the forces on the manual trim wheel are much too high. It's not too surprising. The aircraft's growth since the 1960s has been massive.
First of all, to reiterate, it's not fair to claim that this is the safest airplane, just on that basis. There are other failures that might be happening completely independently of the MCAS that could lead to similar situations in flight when you have high forces on the column and on the manual trim wheel and several types of different malfunctions could happen in the system itself.
It appears to me that it would have made sense, once they introduced MCAS, to ask, “Hold on. MCAS is going to talk to this critical system, the most critical system on the aircraft, and we're not going to put it up to contemporary standards?” Regulations don't force them to do so, but if the new regulation modifications that I'm proposing were ever to be implemented, or had they been applied, or if we could magically apply them retroactively to the development of the 737 Max, I guarantee that the design flaws would have been found and corrected, and the two crashes would have been avoided.