> The point still stands, the root cause was MCAS

Agreed. One could argue that the AoA reading mismatch was the root cause, but the plane alerted the pilots to the discrepancy just as it was meant to (through stick shake and panel readouts).

They were aware of the issue, took measures to mitigate them, and MCAS still drove the plane into the ground.

> It's true there were aggravating factors, like the inability to manually rectify trim, which (would seem to me) would be a aerodynamic or design issue.

I don't see in the report that the pilots attempted to both operate the manual trim wheel at the same time. I'm not sure if its explicit in the training, but in the manual its made clear that pilots may need to work together to move the trim out of extreme positions when the electric system is not available, and that doing so will not break the manual trim system.

I don't think they were concerned about snapping the cable, but based on a simulation run last week by a Swedish pilot (who needed both arms locked around the column to keep it held back, towards the end), and the reports' notes of the pilot repeatedly instructing the co-pilot to help him trim up, the forces on the column were such that the pilot couldn't assist in cranking AND continue to pull back on the column at the same time.

Releasing the stick to assist with the wheel would have meant allowing the plane to nose-dive. This might have allowed them to crank in the stabilizer in time to recover, but they only had 7,000 feet above the ground to work with.

Likewise had Boeing designed a control surfaces system such that the pilot always has more control authority than the trim this also would not have happened.

I didn't say that MCAS wasn't the lions share root cause here. It's just not as simple as the "hurr durr, MCAS bad" that a lot of people keep trying to portray the more nuanced statements of various regulatory agencies as being equivalent to. MCAS might be bad but on an aircraft with a different trim system it wouldn't be "hurr durr" levels of bad.

Are there any airliners from any manufacturer where the pilot always has enough authority to override full trim?

Airbus just gives you a joystick with no force feedback at all. So yes ... but an entirely different philosophy. You tell the aircraft what you want it to do and it figures out how to do it. I suppose these recent events could be used as an argument against the idea of doing essentially fly by wire but then putting in a whole lot of extra stuff to make it seem that you are not doing fly by wire.

No, on Airbus the joystick still only moves the elevator, which has less control authority than the stabilizer, which is what trim controls.

It normally moves both as required. A good explanation here:

* https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/15268/how-does-...

Even if things degrade all the way down to "direct law" the pilot does not feel any aerodynamic force caused by the trim position.

We are talking about two different interpretations of the word "authority". In the case of the incidents, the pilots were physically unable to overcome the simulated force for an extended time.

Thanks for the correction! Reading about this brought me to:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XL_Airways_Germany_Flight_88...

with some similarities to the Ethiopian crash

I doubt this is possible. If it was it would be a certification requirement because it would make any trim runaway incident trivial.