It’s the TOGA thrust that got them maggot. Dynamic pressure goes up logarithmically and at 400 kts plus they just couldn’t pull the elevators to up and the stab to trim nose up, in fact the stab was still moving nose down, being ‘pushed’ by the air pressure. I don’t have an opinion in either direction, the warning noises, aerodynamic noise, multiple cautions, it would have been a very stressful situation, too stressful indeed. I know the memory items for unreliable airspeed but if you follow them and maintain level flight or a downwards trajectory then you are going to over speed quite significantly as shown here. The old saying.....’there but for the grace of god go I’ but I like to think I would have had the sense to identify the increasing airspeed. When we practice this in the sim (unreliable airspeed) we allow the aircraft to climb, as you do no doubt. And yes, I know, perhaps they thought they were stalling so persisted with the max thrust......but I know the outcome of max thrust and level flight at sea level/5000’ and so do you...........the MCAS, well we were all in the dark about it’s mysterious machinations but it was running for quite long periods of time over and over again. Watch your STS or autopilot trim next time, it would be lucky to run for a few seconds at a time followed by large periods of inactivity. Big picture stuff I suppose, and the other old saying as well.....’you get out of it what you put into it’. I believe that Ethiopian Airlines never disseminated the EAD to the crew that Boeing put out. We don’t fly the max so never got the EAD but I can tell you I’ve done a lot of research into this. I feel I have a reasonable appreciation of what happened and have thought about it a lot and what I would do in a similar situation, all with the benefit of hindsight of course, such a wonderful thing. So have you, I would assume and so have 99.9% of all Boeing pilots world wide.
hope I don’t come across as a condescending
pr@ck, I wasn’t there, never been in the situation, not sure how I would handle it but I would hope I could achieve a much better outcome.