I think the final report will be very interesting and I am not saying what did or did not happen. I was just trying to point out that between this report and other testing, it is possible that the pilots did everything right/per procedure and could still be in an unwinnable position. Its not like the FAA has had to step in and force corrections on aircraft manufacturers before.
I also don’t know exactly how it went, and I know Ethiopian has a pretty good reputation. I also know that having a 200 hour FO in that plane didn’t help.
The initial report shows the pilots initially followed Boeing's procedure in that they hit the trim cut off switch.. But then they failed to reduce power and airspeed. They kept the power at takeoff and got up to 365 KIAS and had overspeed warnings going off. Max thrust makes the nose go up requiring more control pressure to lower the nose. Higher speed makes it harder to manually trim and adds to required yoke pressure. When they had a hard time pushing the nose over because of the airspeed and power, they REENGAGED the trim switch causing the last unrecoverable nose over. If they had reduced power and airspeed, they would have required significantly less yoke pressure to control the nose attitude and would have had a much easier time manually trimming. By failing to do this and reengaging the trim switch, they caused the last fatal nose over into the ground.
MAX completions are at over 60 per month - Boeing leaned the hell out production production flow - they will do everything necessary to keep customers happy.
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