There's actually some precedent for this happening: AA flight 191, a DC-10 that crashed in 1979, wasn't equipped with two stick shakers (a stall warning device) - a paid option at the time.
The series of events that caused the accident are a long story, but power was knocked out to the pilot's controls (where the one stick shaker was installed), but not the copilot's controls (which didn't have a stick shaker due to the selected options). TBH, it's doubtful that the pilots could have recovered in that specific situation, but the chances of success dropped to basically zero when they didn't have a device capable of communicating what was happening to them in time.
Of course, this is obviously different than having no warning system for the type of failure whatsoever (as appears to be the case on the MAX), but it was still a little surprising for me.
Good info thanks. But yeah, with a stick shaker there are many other ways for the pilots to get the same info, so I can sort of understand that as being optional for the copilot. Obviously not ideal, but at the end of the day engineering is nothing but compromise management :)
The series of events that caused the accident are a long story, but power was knocked out to the pilot's controls (where the one stick shaker was installed), but not the copilot's controls (which didn't have a stick shaker due to the selected options). TBH, it's doubtful that the pilots could have recovered in that specific situation, but the chances of success dropped to basically zero when they didn't have a device capable of communicating what was happening to them in time.
Of course, this is obviously different than having no warning system for the type of failure whatsoever (as appears to be the case on the MAX), but it was still a little surprising for me.