Originally Posted by
737 Driver
Forced to hand-fly an aircraft when he was uncomfortable with doing so and facing a significant distraction in the form of the stick shaker, he appears to have fallen back on default behaviors like trying to fly a "normal" takeoff profile (A/P @ 400', climb to 1000', retract the flaps) when it was not appropriate (particularly retracting the flaps given what was known about MCAS). The aircraft was never really stabilized when MCAS kicked in, and by that time it appears the Captain had achieved cognitive overload making the remainder of his attempts to control the situation ineffectual. I think the FO did the best that he could, but I really don't know how assertive a three-month 360 hour First Officer could be in this situation.
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The report does state that the FO called trim runaway so he was not totally inert.
There is a saying in medicine that rare conditions are most likely to be diagnosed by bright interns or very experienced doctors. The intern does not have the experience to reject improble diagnoses while the very experienced are more likely to pick up on the "something does not fit" observations. From your description one would have to say the Captain was in the moderately (at best) experienced category.
The other possible trap is that the since Captain
was able to engage the autopilot before he selected flaps up he may have thought things were better than they were, false stick shaker only moderate airspeed disagree.
Does anyone know the likely reading of the backup (uncorrected for AoA) air speed indicator in these conditions?