Originally Posted by
Loose rivets
Stabilizer runaway memory actions are so fundamental that the thread's detective logic changed quickly to looking at the ~5 second delay adding to the confusion of an already chaotic flight-deck - causing a radical diversion from old established SOPs.
There seems to be a significant amount of hindsight bias regarding the specific term "runaway". A lot of the discussion is now anchored to what has been revealed about MCAS and the behavior of this aircraft. If you survey every single poster in this thread before this incident and asked them to describe what "runaway stabilizer" looks like, I imagine the answers would be quite different than what you would get in a poll with hindsight of this incident. For an example of a 2016 reference guide description of runaway stabilizer, google:
The Ultimate B737 NG Technical Handbook STABILISER TRIM SYSTEM AND RUNAWAY STABILISER
It's not even clear that the previous crew diagnosed a "runaway"
and followed the NNC. They may have gone directly to the cutout switches as a way to isolate an unknown electrical trim problem- they later reported that they believed it was STS operating in reverse due to IAS issues. This may even have been a conclusion/guess they reached later in the flight rather than a contemporaneous diagnosis.
EDIT: climber314 pointed out that the preliminary report says they followed the Runaway Stabilizer NNC. Hopefully we get more specifics on this later.