It's easy now to point the finger and say "Airmanship" when you know the innards of the damn thing. They had one airworthyness directive, and maybe a grand total of five paragraphs in the entire manual, plus a memory item checklist that didn't accurately reflect the detail of an MCAS failure. An MCAS failure is not continuous uncommanded trim. It's discrete pulses,
I appreciate the detail and effort, and you certainly speak as an experienced member of the industry; but pushing this off to the pilot's when there is so much that had to happen before the plane left the factory for them to be in that position is a bit much.
There is whistleblower testimony that the decision to not implement a multi-sensor MCAS was intentional to avoid the financial consequences of having to have pilots put in simulator time.
You can't sit here and say the pilots weren't good enough when the manufacturer went out of their way to make sure they could skulk a plane by regulators with the least amount of training humanly possible, safety be damned. To do so is not just mad, it's unconscionable. It's the very thing of insanity. A Catch-22 if I've ever heard one.
This is not the behavior I expect from someone whom I'll voluntarily talk to.
It was climbing at Vmo; they could have pulled back the power to not let the plane overspeed, rather than exceeding Vmo.
Hopefully at Vmo they could move the trim wheel, but if not, they could wait until they had a few thousand feet more height, aerodynamically unloaded and trimmed.
> So they reenabled the electric trim, at which point MCAS jumped in again and everybody died.
They re-enabled the electric trim, and touched the electric trim switch a couple of times but left the plane far out of trim. I can't figure this out-- there's even an indicator that makes it obvious you're out of trim. Why re-enable electric trim and not really use it?
Then after a timeout after they pushed the trim switch, MCAS jumped in again and everyone died.