Coverage released on Apr 16th:
On Apr 11th 2019 The Aviation Herald received a full copy of the Flight Operations Manual (FOM), Revision 18B released on Nov 30th 2018, which is currently being used by Ethiopian Airlines (verified in April 2019 to be current). Although Boeing had issued an operator's bulletin on Nov 6th 2018, which was put into
Emergency Airworthiness Directive 2018-23-51 dated Nov 7th 2018 requiring the stab trim runaway procedure to be incorporated into the FOM ahead of the sign off of this version of the FOM (the entire document is on file but not available for publishing), there is no trace of such an addition in the entire 699 pages of the FOM.
Quite the opposite, in section 2.6 of the FOM "Operational Irregularities" the last revision is provided as Revision 18 dated "Nov 1st 2017".
According to information The Aviation Herald had received in March 2019, the Airline Management needed to be reminded to distribute the Boeing Operator's Bulletin as well as the EAD to their pilots, eventually the documents were distributed to the flight crew. However, it was never verified, whether those documents had arrived, were read or had been understood. No deeper explanation of the MCAS, mentioned but not explained in both documents, was offered.
It turned out, that only very cursory knowledge about the stab trim runaway procedure exists amongst the flight crew of Ethiopian Airlines even 5 months after the EAD was distributed. In particular, none of the conditions suggesting an MCAS related stab trim runaway was known with any degree of certainty. In that context the recommendation by the accident flight's first officer to use the TRIM CUTOUT switches suggests, that he was partially aware of the contents of the EAD and reproduced some but not all of the provisions and not all of the procedure, which may or may not explain some of the obvious omissions in following the procedure in full.