Originally Posted by
Aloha_KSA
As a long-time 737 driver I'll just chime-in a few points.
[Long-ish, totally on-point observations, clearly based upon long experience, here.]
A better question might be: given this nose down attitude, high speed, and fully nose down or almost fully nose down stab, how much altitude would they have had to have to be able to recover. I'm thinking at least 10000 feet to recognize the problem, disconnect the switches, fold out the handle and start frantically winding the stab back to normalcy while the flying pilot tries to gain control via the elevator. It's entirely possible that this scenario, if not recognized early on, is unrecoverable at any altitude.
This, to me, a once-upon-a time mech and long-time engineer, is the "truthiest" post of this long thread. From the moment, in the Lion Air thread that we began to understand the existence and potential reality of MCAS, my image of being on the flight deck of one of these accident aircraft has been eerily like Aloha_KSA's depiction.
I understand why some pilots want to believe that they would have recognized what was happening, hit the pedestal cutout switches and trimmed the aircraft manually, but everything I know about human factors in sudden and new emergency situations says, "No, you very probably would not." This whole, frankly unforgivable, design and certification mess is a formula that was destined to end up with HAL killing everyone.