The story of MCAS in 737MAX started way back when Airbus announced its newly designed aircraft Airbus A320neo on Dec 1st, 2010. According to Airbus, the latest design was powerful and 15 percent more fuel-efficient. They made the new design such that, It would take the least training for the pilot before flying the new model.
Challenges with the 737MAX Design
As a competitor, the announcement of the A320neo was not good news for Boeing, so they started working on their new model, and on Aug 30th, 2011 they announced their new model 737MAX for which they didn’t design a completely new plane from the ground up because it would have taken too long. So what they did was upgrade the new more powerful engine on the existing 737 Airframe. However, there was a problem, unlike the Airbus, there wasn’t enough room to fit the new big engine under the wing of the 737 Airframe.
Solution
The product development team of Boeing came up with some adjustments, their solution was to shift up and forward the engine on the wing so that it would fit the engine slightly higher on the wings of the 737 Airframe. But, it had some drawbacks to the aerodynamics of the plane. When 737MAX was in full thrust at high AoA (Angle of Attack) or while in takeoff the nose tends to move upward from the line of the angle of attack which could lead to stall and loss of the lift which is a serious problem. This time they emerged something interesting, instead of re-engineering the plane they introduced a new automated anti-stalling system known as MCAS.
According to Boeing, the system works based on the signal generated by the sensor (accelerometers) mounted on the nose of the aircraft, and the software system installed on the aircraft will automatically adjust the elevator on the rear wing and push the nose downward.
Basically, the plane was pretty the same as the previous version except for MCAS which was a totally new design. Boeing claims its new design was around 8 percent more fuel-efficient than its rival A320neo. It was a game-changer for Boeing. It became the hottest selling plane on the market and since then Boeing’s market growing tremendously. But after the incident of Lion Air, Flight 610, and Ethiopian Airlines, Flight 302, all the 737 MAX around the world has been grounded for investigation.