Boeing has a problem with the elevator. The elevator needs to be able to overpower the stab even if the stab is jammed full nose up or full nose down.
They need to redesign the elevator and the FAA needs to enforce their own rules and regulations.
The elevator not being able to overpower the stab is BS. Having to trim to recover from a stall as the elevator doesn't have enough authority is BS. Boeing knows it and tried to "fix" it by adding the MCAS to drive nose down stabilizer trim automatically based on the AOA. Oh, and to make sure it is effective they designed it so that the stabilizer trim commands are NOT interrupted even when the control column is displaced in the opposite direction. Oh, and they didn't bother to tell anyone. What can go wrong? This is total BS.
You can do more training to switch off electrical power to the stab, but that is not a complete solution. What happens if the stab jams fully deflected next time?
Interestingly, it looks like you can overwrite the automatic movement of the stabilizer by using the thumb switches (sadly no more by pulling up) so it looks like the MCAS trimmed the nose down, the pilot flying pulled up and trimmed up, effectively keeping the situation nearly stable. Looks like this repeated multiple times, but at the end they stopped trimming and ended up just pulling up which ultimately resulted in the loss of control.
Last edited by sgrd0q; 11-29-2018 at 05:16 AM.