Erroneous MCAS intervention does not look like runaway trim, it looks like speed trim. Which intervenes so frequently with automatic trimming during routine climbs that a slowly turning trim wheel in that flight phase may very well get unnoticed, especially in a very high workload situation (continuous stickshaker and unreliable airspeed).

Both flight recorders retrieved from Ethiopian 737 crash site
 

AoA/Airspeed and MCAS
 

A lot of speculative thought and I add some....

If MCAS is implicated in this and the Lion accident then it is not just the implementation of this software that needs to be thought through.

Should we not also ask about the quality of the data being received by the system? For Lion we are (reliably?) informed that the accident aircraft had been the subject of erroneous AoA data on at least one previous flight and that this had then resulted in the replacement of the sensor. We have generally assumed from the published evidence that the accident flight ALSO suffered from this issue.

At this point William of Occam scratches his head and is wondering whether there is something else in common which is more likely than two sequential AoA failures.

Oh, so trim wheels are moving and everything, it is visible. But it is not speeding away, it is more like making mess slowly and unnoticedly. It loos really mischievously.

as a non-pilot and finance guy (apologies) I feel it necessary to note that Boeing stock has increased by 26% since Lion Air...i wonder if this metric is the one that takes precedence above all else. (those who bought stock during the "troubled" early days of the 787 would be sitting on 10 fold profits...)

Direct Law landing
 

I flew Alternate Law and landed Direct Law in a 321 after AOA transient due icing. (Unreliable Speed, A/THR and AP lost, all recovered after we climbed above the icing level,which was FL220). Direct Law in the a/c was easier than the sim, not bad at all[/QUOTE]

Question: is this plane dangerous? if you have children, are you going to let them travel on board of A 737 max ?

"one thing that I am pretty sure about is that is that engineers at both at Boeing and at Airbus know a lot more about appropriate aircraft design and what is going on here than participants on this board -- and are not as clueless about these things as so many comments seem to imply.[/QUOTE]
Yup, maybe as knowledgeable as the designers of the DC10 - they knew the design was dodgy, but what the hell.,I'm sure it will be fine.

That's a black/white question to a greyscale issue. Plane is not "dangerous" or "safe". It has a level of safety which looks less than we expected.

I'd give that a miss right now thanks and wait till we see FDR results. But then I'm a coward when I'm SLF :}

Black streak?
 

Well, there seems to be an anomaly in terms of crashes per flights. I would not put my family on that plane until the reason for this crash is clearer. And if it's mcas again, then... well then it's going to be grounded anyways I suppose.

Given the shape of the impact crater, I believe the "trail" you are seeing is a debris field beyond the crash site; i.e. the a/c was traveling left-to-right in the orientation of this photo.

Feel free to chime in if you have other ideas, so we can discuss them. That is what this forum is about, rumours and their credibility.

Agreed. People should have some relevant aviation involvement as crew, engineer, atc, ops etc to post in this group. At the very least, the poster details should contain an option to include a synopsis of their background.