The common element between Lion Air and Air France crashes is bad sensor data: AOA and airspeed, respectively. A computerized system, no matter how sophisticated, cannot protect pilots from themselves in the absence of accurate sensor data.
> The common element between Lion Air and Air France crashes is bad sensor data
Agreed but the context is completely different. The airbus flight computers rely on data from three sensors and thus are triply redundant. AF447 happened in severe icing conditions with water ingressing into the pitot tubes on the ground. All three pitot tubes froze, causing all three sensors to report bad data. The aircraft identified the discrepancy and degraded from normal law to alternate law as expected so it would not make any decisions based on the faulty data. The crash ultimately was caused by the pilots being disoriented because of the very low visibility. The sidestick issue is a different discussion, but its not related to the 737MAX accidents.
The MCAS system on the other hand is not triply redundant, and that's what people have issue with. Boeing itself has more redundant envelope protections on the newer models like the 777 and 787.
Although it is perfectly possible to fly an aircraft with the loss of certain instruments. And even if the plane is in a stall, there are established procedures for getting out of it that don't involve flying the plane into the ground. But the computer would need to be prepared to disregard some data in favour of other data.
The common element between Lion Air and Air France crashes is bad sensor data: AOA and airspeed, respectively. A computerized system, no matter how sophisticated, cannot protect pilots from themselves in the absence of accurate sensor data.