Originally Posted by
737 Driver
Which is precisely why, when presented with an undesired aircraft state, unknown or ambiguous malfunction, or a loss of situational awareness, the flying pilot must be ready and able to Turn off the magic, Set the Pitch, Set the Power, Trim the aircraft, Monitor the performance, and Move the aircraft to a safe altitude. You do not have to know what is going on. You do need to know how to stabilize the aircraft and place it in a safe position so you then have the time to figure out what is going on.
The first step in your mantra is "turn off the magic". What Boeing did by implementing MCAS severely undermines that first step, because they added an additional bit of "magic", that can't be turned off using the old procedures (A/P off, A/T off, FD off). Instead, turning off this bit of "magic" requires disabling manual electric trim as well, with the cutout switches.
I think it wouldn't hurt if Boeing would implement some way to disable automatic trim independently from manual electric trim. Something that can disable both STS and MCAS without forcing you to use the trim wheels for the rest of the flight.
Since making significant changes to the cockpit like adding switches is probably out of the question, maybe there should be a way to completely disable automatic trim, using existing switches. For example using the existing cutout switches. Placing them in the cutout position, waiting a few seconds, then switching them back to normal could be used as a way to disable automatic trim, but leave manual electric trim functional. That would require just a software change.
Then your mantra would work just fine, if you include this additional sub-step of "Auto-Trim Off" as part of "turn off the magic".