Originally Posted by
737 Driver
In the case of ET302, however, the MCAS input lasted 9 continuous seconds which equates to around 37 spins of the manual trim wheel. The entire time, the Captain has the yoke in his hands and the control pressures increase dramatically. This happened at least twice. What about this does not scream runaway trim?
I agree that’s a bit more obvious but we are now in the “end game” where the goose is close to being irreversibly cooked. What it screams to me is that the pilot(s) were so overloaded by control forces / stick shake / aural and visual warnings / general confusion that they had reverted to “pull back to make the houses look smaller” and had fixated on this due to saturation of their input channels. The trim running could well be the gorilla in the room, if you’ve seen the video.
As many have worked out, the stabiliser is a very powerful pitch control on the 737 and the elevator is just a trim, really. I’m not sure how much emphasis is put on that in training these days.