Originally Posted by
fotoguzzi
(Still not a pilot) Thanks. It is understandable that one would not want to remove his hands from the yoke. MCAS seems to give five seconds after the last electric trim, and I presume it does not operate while the trim switch operates. My contention is that if they are reading ahead, they know some cranking is coming, and would naturally trim before cutout. That is, one argument is that MCAS trims faster than the trim switch can, but (unless I am wrong) MCAS will give you as much time as needed to trim before it tries to undo your work.
At what point the combination of nose down and overspeed makes hand cranking unreasonable (or makes even the idea of letting go of the yoke unreasonable), seems yet unclear. The penultimate Indonesian flight continued to destination while the Ethiopian flight lasted minutes.
I think it is generally accepted that full nose-down stabilizer position at high airspeed, low altitude may be unrecoverable via the manual trim wheel.
We think we know that the ET302 crew activated the STAB TRIM CUTOUT, leaving them in a potentially vulnerable position if the stabilizer was already at or near its maximum nose down position. We also think we know that the crew re-enabled the electric trim at some stage -- the FDR should therefore show whether the crew subsequently attempted to level the aircraft via the electric trim after re-enabling it (and by extension) MCAS. I think that will be a key indicator as to the crew's understanding of what the cause of their flight control problem was, and what they understood they needed to do to recover from it.
By that I mean -- when the crew re-enabled electric trim, did they attempt to recover the dive using the electric trim switches ?