Unfortunately, we don't know if flying the plane without MCAS is even safe. MCAS was required for a reason, and disabling it at an inopportune time might be disastrous.
MCAS was required to keep a linear relationship between the force applied to the flight stick and the pitch-up control moment.
There is nothing magical about this linear relationship; it is an intuitive configuration for pilots, but many other aircraft do not follow it. The requirement makes sense for single-certification, but we must be clear in understanding what is actually happening with this system.
The system counters the hazard of pilots experienced in 'regular' 737s getting close to stalling without realizing, due to lighter stick inputs not having the intended effect. Any MCAS malfunction would direct their attention to this issue.
Actual anti-stall systems (MCAS is not anti-stall, nevermind some shoddy reporting) would still function if a pilot were to approach this flight envelope. This includes cabin alerts, stick shakers, etc.
The scenario where MCAS cuts out, and it's in the envelope of conditions where it actually functions, and the pilots fail to notice this, and the MCAS inputs were needed to avoid approaching a stall, and the pilots fail to correct and avoid the stall .. it's a contrived hypothetical.
MCAS is not a system that activates on a normal flight. Only in relatively extreme circumstances does it even function, and then it only seeks to make intuitive pilot behavior less likely to approach stall conditions. A good pilot monitoring airspeed, trim angle, AoA, etc. will be able to avoid a stall just as well without the system.
>The scenario where MCAS cuts out, and it's in the envelope of conditions where it actually functions, and the pilots fail to notice this, and the MCAS inputs were needed to avoid approaching a stall, and the pilots fail to correct and avoid the stall .. it's a contrived hypothetical.
On a 737 they are retracted early in the climb, typically between 1000 and 1250 feet. If the slight stick movement the pilot is accustomed to to bring the elevation down 2-3* fails to do so cause MCAS does not engage, there's not a whole lot of distance to recover from a stall then.
> If the slight stick movement the pilot is accustomed to to bring the elevation down 2-3* fails to do so
This is completely unrelated to MCAS, though? Since the goal of MCAS wasn't "bring the nose down" but instead "increase the pressure on the stick required to maintain a certain nose-up attitude", I'd be really flabbergasted if it was supposed to operate in a normal takeoff environment.
MCAS was required because without it the control stick feedback is incorrect in some high-power, high-AOA scenarios - scenarios not within the normal flight envelope. That's all it was for - stick feel. And that's important! But not something that'll knock a plane out of the sky.
