Because you can’t use pitch and power when MCAS is doing what it’s doing unless you kill the trim switches. The MCAS is operative WHILE handflying
The issue is recognition of what’s happening.
Air speed unreliable while the stick shaker is going crazy nose pitches down at 1k feet AGL?
You’re telling me that with the current training, you’d figure out what’s going on? You click off autopilot and it gets WORSE? Unless you’ve had training on the system...aside from a CBT.

 

I think that a lot of the Monday morning quarterbacks here should wait for the final results of both investigations before judging the pilots' skills. How easy to criticize those who can't defend themselves. Try also imagining the situation at low altitude when your airplane is aggressively trimming forward, your attitude indicator is showing excessive pitch up, stick shaker is going on, you continuously keep overriding the nose down pitch with your stab trim. As I understand from the little information we got about the MCAS, you can override the auto trim forward with your stab trim switch, but the moment you let go off the switch it immediately trims back down. So you have the trim spinning back and forth (thus the oscillations in both accidents) at low altitude and low airspeed. No memory items to turn of the stab trim cutout switches. Not too much time to run QRH, not enough training and information about the system. Some say the other crew that brought the Lion Air airplane the day prior successfully ran the checklist and turned the stab trims switches off. It's true, but they were much higher, during a descent with completely different aircraft energy and attitude. Think what you want, but I consider blaming the crews for being not experienced or not well trained as scapegoating. I think Boeing created the problem and they should assume the responsibility. And for all you great aviators that have so much experience, think about what they went through right after you take off. Add night conditions or IMC if you like...

 

I wouldn't say .27°/second of nose down pitch is aggressive. We take off using 2-3° of nose up pitch per second and that is in no way aggressive.
http://www.b737.org.uk/mcas.htm

 

Try to imagine being a low altitude and not knowing how to manually trim the airplane. If either of these crews had been able to do that, the airplanes would still have been flyable.

They had the ability to correct the trim--but some pilots method of trimming an airplane is to turn on the autopilot. As far out of whack that the MCAS seems to put the trim, the autopilot would not be able to turn on--or not have authority to keep the airplane in level flight.

TTFA -- if you're a pilot and don't know that acronym, you're part of the problem.

 

I had to look it up.

 

You sir are evil.... funny, but evil

 

Agree with this very much ^^^^^

 

Also looked it up - Thenoyltrifluoroacetone

Still no idea what that is.

 

Question: when MCAS is operating, does the "stab wheel" also turn?

I assume it does.

 

Seems logical. It's trimming and the wheel turns any other time it's happening. But, I don't know for certain.