But the thing is that flight manuals do not provide internalized models of how an airplane really flies. You have to get that from operating the machine. And furthermore, if you operate it carefully, within normal parameters associated with passenger flight, you won't get exposed to the extreme flight regimes where this knowledge is actually useful and important. So you can have 10,000 hours in a plane and still not know what it will do in an unusual situation. This *is* something you can learn in a simulator, if it is sufficiently faithful, and I think that is one learning that I think experts can already agree on regarding the MAX: the pilots should have gotten more sim time, including time that exposes them to the behavior of the aircraft in unusual scenarios that are specific to that model.
That is the whole point is it not? According to that eetimes article Boeing claimed that any experienced 737 pilot did not need additional training or simtime for the max.
That is also why it was a big seller, the airlines did not have to invest in hours of training and that was a massive saving. It is also probably in the future the reason that if there has to be substantial additional training, the airlines will cancel their orders.
Yes, that was the aircraft's goal and claim. And pilots are really trained these days to avoid the need for heroic mastery of ship's aerodynamics rather than trying to achieve such mastery. Today's pilots just don't have great stick and rudder skills, and that's turned out to be safe for the most part because other than trying to fly actually broken or malfunctioning aircraft, such skills rarely come up. They do, from time to time: USAir 1549, good outcome, AF447, bad outcome.
MCAS was designed to keep pilots from ever experiencing the instability of a MAX at extreme AOA. This was probably judged safer than trying to teach pilots to deal with it. Folks are saying that was not a sound engineering decision and I think they don't generally know what they're talking about. These are complex decisions, and history and human factors, and what can be expected of 1 std dev below mean pilots all figure into it.
But MCAS introduced a new failure mode (or modes) of its own, due to mistakes or poor enginneering, or reasons still unknown, and pilots have obviously not been able to handle that. The solution could be training on these failure modes or it could be fixing MCAS, or all of the above.