Originally Posted by
reamer
Didn't the ET crew leave it a long time before cutting off the stab trim switches.
So long in fact that the trim was so far out as to make manual trimming impossible.
This is not the procedure recomended. The equivalent of putting in rudder on a V1 cut when the aircraft has rolled on it's back.
Depends what you consider a "long time" - from the details we have they appear to have diagnosed a stab trim problem and hit the cutouts within 40sec, which is a lot quicker than I recall in e.g. MentourPilot's demo videos. It's also a lot quicker than the first LionAir crew.
They were actually trimming _up_ when they hit the cutouts - so you are dead wrong there because if they'd left it _longer_ before hitting the cutouts they would have been _less_ out of trim, not more.
Why quit when you are winning? - fear of counter attack maybe. Maybe they thought they were near enough back in trim that they could cutout and do the rest manually and that was better than risking another MCAS. Maybe, just possibly, they'd even practised that in the sim - but the sim, as we now know (and they didn't), wasn't/isn't accurate on the trim wheel forces. We know that
some ET pilots
were trying to replicate the LionAir scenario in sim from the leaked email from one of them (which, assuming it is not fabricated, is scarily prophetic - "throw in a GPWS PULL UP and it would be a crash for sure").
All this is, of course, just speculation. I would put money on there being something the crew
could have done to avoid the crash (because statistically with air accidents that is a winning bet), I am not qualified to say what they
should have done, and have no idea what I would have done. However, when we have one crash and lots of people saying "should have done X (fast/first/etc.)" and than another crash after similar failure when they
did "do X" followed by people saying "did X too quickly, should have done Y first etc." there is the smell of lots of missing "in hindsight"s in the air (and it doesn't matter whether the field in question is aviation or not). When I see some people saying of the same event "they did X too quick" while others say "they did X too slow", it makes me think this one may not be soluble even with 20/20 hindsight.