Comment by lumost
5 years ago
The cost of retraining the pilots was something that's been shouldered dozens of times in the past. I'd imagine that an Engineering CEO making a bold bet that software could avoid the retraining need would have been both more ambitious and smarter about the change. Why not build the right airframe and give the plane flight modes to emulate the characteristics of various 7xx aircraft that pilots were familiar with?
Good point. I'm truly curious how far up the chain that decision went. Knowing how software gets written, I'd be willing to bet there were quite a few informal discussions about the various trade offs of the possible approaches taken to meet the design requirements.