tomaski
I agree that it would be a lot to ask of any pilot who had not been trained for a malfunction like this, but it is not inherently an impossible situation with the proper training. I think the germane question is whether changes need to be made to the current pilot training regimen. I can tell you from personal experience that until the MAX accidents, training for anything that looked like runaway stab trim had been spotty to non-existent at my airline (a reasonably well-regarded "developed world" operation). I suspect we were not the only ones who neglected this training for far too long.
Lets see - Assuming pilot realized he had to use trim switch to get near level trim BEFORE hitting kill switch - how long did he have ? Seems to me he had at best 5 seconds - now with a typical call - response - action - how much ' slack ' was available ??