Originally Posted by ShyGuy

Ethiopian? The FO trimmed the wheel the wrong way (nose down) by a little amount. And then reported to the CA he couldn’t get the trim wheel to work.

Both cases thrust was forward and stayed that way the entire time. Yes, you need to dissipate speed in order to use the manual trim wheel. Or, and this is gonna sound crazy, slow down below Vmax and stop the over speed clacker.

The Ethiopian CA’s plan from the get go was to engage the autopilot. When the trim cutout switches and wheel trimming didn’t work for them (because of incompetence and information overload), they re-engaged the stab trim cutout switches. To re-engage them implies they wanted to use the yoke trim switch aggressively. But they never did. They flicked it a couple times and that was it. MCAS activated again. The CA was pulling about half back on the yoke just to hold level, and losing the battle. He tried to engage the AP again. It didn’t work because the plane was out of whack with mis-trimming. In his last second attempt to re-engage the AP, he released all back pressure on the yoke and tried to engage the AP. That was the kiss of death, releasing the back pressure. But again, shows you how desperate the CA was and wanting to use the AP to “fly” his airplane.

Lion Air I can understand, no one knew of MCAS ramifications, but this Eth crew knew via the emergency bulletins and the behavior to expect. They should have been able to recover from it. Pure incompetence.