Have you flown a 737? There is the little issue of the circular-saw/trim-wheel whirring away beside your knee to let you know something is amiss.
Isn’t the procedure to disable the system a memory item checklist, ‘Stab Trim Runaway’? Hardly a secret.

Yes there is little to go on just yet, but what they do have seems very similar to the Lion Air accident.

Does anyone here have any MAX experience? How do we know that Boeing haven’t changed a system design that is now causing a problem that not even they know about?

Rudder hardovers ring a bell?

Good one mate, the root cause in the Kegworth crash was ..... Pilot Error.

Yep and that was his point . We sat through hours and hours of explanations, pointers and tips as if it were a miracle it happened to a white crew . Had of been a black crew no need to bother with a comprehensive CRM course . Pilot error , moving along .

Cultures, not race , affect flight deck performance.

The Aussie bogan for instance , prevalent in the low cost arena, can be a real shocker in on the flight deck .😀

I would suggest both you and the 7ft brother missed the point of the CRM. Not withstanding that, you are correct that it is a culture issue and hopefully will be discussed further.

Read the effing Boeing SB before opening your yaps. It says that once you have realized you have one or more alerts and nose down trimming behaviour, restrain the trim wheel by hand then turn the bloody thing off and trim manually. What could be simpler than that?

I will then. “You can teach monkeys to fly better than that!”

As I understand the MCAS behaviour it trims in a ten second movement then stops for five seconds or whenever normal electric trim is selected on the control column trim switches.

The runaway stabiliser non normal condition statement reads:

Uncommanded stabilizer​ trim movement occurs CONTINUOUSLY.

That's how 737 pilots have been taught to recognise and correct a runaway stab. I have had one in a -300 and, while comparatively benign, it was not obvious what was going on with the stab until removing electric power per the checklist memory step. (It didn’t help)

I cannot agree with posters here who think it a simple matter for a crew to recognise the full scope of a problem when airspeed reliability is in doubt and the stick shaker is vibrating constantly. And an undocumented* feature is reacting to a bad sensor by doing its best to prevent a stall by nose-diving into the planet.

The stabiliser, while a secondary control, is very powerful-more so than the elevator. While fighting a grossly out-of-trim stab
might sound doable, but it may be possible in an acme screw jack design to bind the nut on the shaft and lock the stab in position until air loads can be relieved. The 737 is from that era of design.

*undocumented until after Lion of course, but how much sim training on inadvertent MCAS activation has been accomplished in the last five months.

All of this assumes facts not currently in evidence...it may have been something completely unrelated.

oh...4Holer? I have a US ATPL that I got in a box of Corn Flakes. I can’t say that its made me a better pilot but I'll take your word for it.

“IF” Flightradar24 data is to be believed, this doesn’t sound like an MCAS issue. The aircraft got to 250kts by 600’ and 380kts by 800’ (heights above airfield).

This really only indicates a pitch control problem or a pilot problem. They didn’t have a thrust problem.

Now, MCAS is not active with flaps extended - Lion Air did not have an MCAS issue until they retracted flaps. We don’t know whether Ethiopian retracted the flaps, of course, but it certainly appears that they were not flying normally prior to 500’, and one would normally have flaps out at that point (unless one had a pilot problem).

So until FDR data is analysed, this accident initally appears unrelated to Lion Air.

The F24 data I refer to is published in the main thread on R&N.

The other thing of note that happened to Lion Air was nuisance stick shaker from rotation. But I can’t fathom that this flight profile could result from a simple AOA failure causing nuisance stick shaker - even with a below average pilot. And that nuisance stick shaker presumably was not just a MAX related issue - the NG presumably suffers the same nuisance stick shaker potential with a faulty AOA. How many nuisance stick shakers on rotate have we heard of in NG’s? I also note that the Captain was a new Captain, but he apparently had 8000 hours (don’t know what type).

So the grounding to me sounds like overkill.

Yes, I think Boeing should fix the MCAS AOA input redundancy in the MAX. Well-trained pilots should be able to deal with that issue, but in this day and age we simply need to accept that not all pilots globally are well-trained, and in this day and age a new aircraft should not exhibit such unnecessary lack of redundancy. The grounding, even if overkill, will hopefully get the wheels moving pretty quickly in both Boeing and the FAA for an improvement to MAX MCAS redundancy.

But just to consider Sunfish’s “politics” argument: I think I read somewhere that Boeing would have implemented a software fix to MCAS by now if it wasn’t for the US government shutdown crippling the FAA’s ability to certify Boeing’s proposed “fix”, which was in turn caused by internal US politics over who should pay for a wall to stop the Mexicans ruining their country. So we can blame the Mexicans for the recent crash in Africa, to which CASA has responded by simply jumping on a global bandwagon simply to screw the Fijians, all the while allowing the Indonesian low cost carriers to continue flying here. Wow, our regulator has balls. Got it.

Yup! So much for VIPA.

RSo they’re now grounded in the US and Canada. Reports that the FAA have analysed initial data from the crash.

Washington Post.