As an engineer, having a flight crew experimentally troubleshoot a problem in a system they don't know or understand - instead of turning back and letting the pro's do it - scares the crap out of me.
13 years ago, an Alaska MD80 experienced a stab trim jam while flying from Mexico to Seattle. Instead of leaving things well enough alone and diverting, they tried to clear the jam by continuing to try alternate inputs into the stab trim.
Their uneducated troubleshooting caused the jack screw to fail catastrophically and the airplane did a nose dive into the Pacific from 18,000 ft.
The families of 88 people would rather they had diverted when they first experience the jam
