I find it fascinating to watch highly qualified and experienced folks take nearly opposite views of the crews’ and Boeing’s respective contributions to the accidents.
I wonder if folks might get closer to consensus if the judged the crews based on what did happen, and Boeing on what could have happened. As SLF, I have to accept that the chaos in the cockpit would have been beyond anything I’m capable of imagining. But I’m still skeptical that a crew trapped in a tug-of-war with the control column shouldn’t have worked out that they should apply nose-up trim – and keep applying it until things got better or it became completely obvious that it wasn’t working.
At the same time, I’m assuming that the AOA probe failure could have happened in IMC. At least I haven’t seen anyone explain why it couldn’t. It seems perfectly reasonable that a crew faced with a stick shaker for no obvious reason and a display showing the horizon rising above the flight path for no obvious reason might hesitate before making major nose-up control and pitch inputs. And it sounds like it could have become too late pretty quickly.
Am I missing something?