Mr. Dunville, we are often reminded around here that this is not airliners.net, so this may get killed:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/maga ... =url-share
I'm willing to say that the '18 JT and '19 ET incidents were more the result of inadequate Flight Crew training than anything else, this pertinent passage regarding JT illustrates just that:
.. They would have a hitchhiker in the cockpit, sitting on the jump seat just behind them. He was an off-duty pilot and, according to one Indonesian pilot I spoke to, a 737 Max captain for a Lion Air subsidiary.
But then there was a change. What had been an information failure suddenly turned into a flight-control one. Soon after the flaps were retracted, the airplane developed a mind of its own and rolled in a fast burst of nose-down trim. Apparently, this caused such a lurch that back in the cabin some passengers started praying. It was just the MCAS kicking in, because the three conditions necessary to trigger it had combined: The flaps were up, the autopilot was off and the captain’s angle-of-attack sensor was showing a stall.....Finally the ghost in the jump seat intervened. It is impossible to know if he was a better airman than the pilots in the front or simply had the advantage of an overview. Either way, he recommended the obvious — shutting off the electric trim by flipping the cutout switches. The captain flipped the switches, the trim stopped running away and the MCAS was disabled. It was that easy.
With the captain’s stick shaker continuing to rattle and the trim switches set to the off (cutout) position, the crew flew to Jakarta without further issue, adjusting trim as sometimes necessary by use of the manual trim wheels mounted on both sides of the central pedestal, and landed just before midnight. ...
From GBN, who's about to take his first MAX flight next Saturday (and he is SOOOO worried
)