JohnBurke

It really isn't.

You're a regional pilot, are you not? What's your experience training in (and flying) Boeing aircraft. From your commentary, zero.

No, it wasn't imperceptible. Clearly you've never been in a Boeing cockpit, let alone a 737.

There are two big wheels, right by each pilot's knee, with a big white stripe across them. Their motion is unmistakable. It's visual. It's tactile. It's audible. It can't be missed. If it's moving when you're not moving it, and the autopilot is disengaged, then it's unwanted trim, and this is an immediate indication that something is amiss.

Trim motion doesn't "sneak up" in any way, shape, or form. It was designed this way, for a reason.

In most platforms, with stabilizer trim, opposing motion will stop the trim; this is the first step. Opposing it with control wheel switch trim (thumb switches) on the control yoke will also stop the trim action. Finally, the cutoff switches. It's stoppable, immediately, and once it's stopped, there's no sneaking.

We train for realistic distractions from day one; the first moment the student gets to the airplane, before he ever opens the door, we use distractions and we never stop using them. Distractions in flying are a fact of life, and part of wearing big boy pants in the cockpit means we do our job, handle the distractions and fly the airplane.

What we don't do is allow the airplane to accelerate beyond it's maximum operating speed and re-engage pitch trim motors after it's clear (and we've recognized and verbalized) that the pitch trim is the problem.

Whereas we're talking about the Ethiopian mishap here, we're talking about a crew that had full information regarding MCAS (the reference is in the report, if you bothered to read it), and who stated, verbally, the problem, and the solution, and then did it. Then reactivated the pitch trim and accelerated to their deaths...neither of those two actions, the combination of which (in concert with their failure to fly the airplane) lead to their deaths and the deaths of all aboard. The aircraft WAS flyable and WAS controllable, and it WAS a VFR morning and they WERE at 7,000' when the evolution began. You really can't ask for more ideal conditions than that.

You have failed to read the report.

They DID turn the switches back on. This is a violation of the procedure. Once the switches are moved to the cutoff position, at no time is trim motor function to be restored: that's the point of the procedure. Don't apply power to the trim motors again. Ever. Don't. Just don't.

They did.

They did just what you say they should do. It enabled the trim to continue to move to a nose down position.

That, in concert with their increasing speed, well beyond the limitations of the airplane, led to their deaths. Not a little nose-down trim. It was flyable and controllable up until they let the speed run away instead of flying the airplane, and the trim wouldn't have moved nose down any more, had they not re-engaged the stab trim. They did the two things that the procedure forbids to do...and not surprisingly, it's just what you recommend: the exact opposite of what should be done.

You have an excuse. You have no idea what you're talking about. They were type rated in the airplane and have no excuse.

Moving the stab trim is irrelevant.

I R R E L E V A N T.

Fly the damn airplane. Nose is trimmed down a bit? Fly the damn airplane. Keep it at the speed where the trim became a problem, and fly the damn airplane.

Because you have no idea what you're talking about, you keep focusing on re-trimming the airplane. Perhaps you're so close to your primary flight training due to your level of experience that you can't let go of this idea, and you think that everything should focus on retrimming the airplane.

Fly the damn airplane. Whether you ever get it back in trim or not is irrelevant. I R R E L E V A N T. Fly the damn airplane.

You get the point? Obviously not.

It's not about reducing speed, though they should have. It's about keeping the speed where it is; eventually speed need to be reduced, but they're at a safe maneuvering altitude, they have time; all they need to do is keep it under control. Sit on their hands, count to ten, think about it. Breathe. Focus. Fly the damn airplane.

The F/O was inexperienced. A wet commercial and a few hours in the airplane, and his thinking was probably about on par with yours. Dangerous. Immature. Uninformed. Inexperienced. A little learning is a dangerous thing.

The captain, on the other hand, he didn't have nearly the excuse. You'll notice, if you ever actually read the report, that he didn't have a lot of experience, but he did have time in type, and all his experience was with the company. He did something telling, though; immediately engaged the autopilot, and he focused on repeatedly trying to engage the autopilot. This is also a dangerous line of thought; if one can't get away from the trivial and focus on flying the damn airplane, then one paints one's self into a corner. For you, it's an obsession with retrimming. For him, while he did suffer from that same misfocus, he kept returning to wanting the autopilot to handle the airplane for him.

Certainly in an emergency, sometimes using the autopilot can free you up to bring more attention to bear on the problem, but when the problem is a flight control issue with a trim issue, and the autopilot won't engage, the immediate concern is flying the airplane, not handing it off, and he focused on engaging autopilot immediately after takeoff, and during the course of the flight.

Recently we see an Atlas pilot who gets stuck in a confirmation bias loop and keeps pushing the nose down for what he perceives as a problem with the airplane trying to pitch up, and here we see a pilot who allows the airpalne to accelerate when he should have been focusing on the opposite.

The problem with the speed was NOT that it made the airplane harder to trim. You don't seem to understand this concept. The problem with increasing speed was that it exacerbated the existing trim force. The trim at 200 knots might be a nuisance. Do nothing but increase airspeed, and at 300 knots it could be a real problem, and at 500 knots, beyond control. The solution: keep the airplane flying at the speed where the problem occurred, but they didn't do that. They accelerated through 500 knots to a point where they ensured the airplane couldn't be controlled.

Forget "porpoising." You're stuck on this idea that they crew had to re-trim. It's good if one is able to retrim, but that is NOT the immediate problem, nor the immediate solution. Flying the damn airplane is the immediate problem. For you millennials, who love acronyms and cell phone speak, FTDA. Fly the damn airplane. FTDA. FTDA. FTDA.

By keeping control of the airplane, which includes roll, pitch, yaw, and airspeed and altitude, the crew would have had a flyable airplane. They did have a flyable airplane until they accelerated to an airspeed that made the airplane uncontrollable. This is the point you really don't seem to be able to grasp, and until you do, you'll go in circles ignorantly fixated on the wrong thing...just like the crew. It was that ignorant fixation, not MCAS or AoA vanes, that killed them, their crew, and all their passengers.