| HN Mirror

Yes, the "correct procedure" would be for the pilots to recognize the MCAS problem (whether they know about the existence of MCAS or not) as a runaway stab trim problem, and treat it as such. One of the steps for the runaway stab trim emergency checklist (which I believe is a memory item for 737 pilots) is to set the stab trim switches to cutoff. At that point, they can manually (with the wheels in the cockpit) return the stabilizer to a better trim position, then recover control of the aircraft.

I'm not a real-world airliner pilot (I just play with them in simulators), so I can't comment on whether it's reasonable to expect pilots to recognize the situation and react accordingly in this new failure mode. Without knowledge of the existence of the MCAS system and how it can fail, with uncommanded nose-down, it's unclear that pilots would think there were any factors they recognize that would cause a runaway trim situation and think, "oh, I need to run the runaway trim checklist." I think that's the crux of the argument "any 737 pilot should have been competent to save the plane because they should have recognized runaway stab trim" versus "the set of conditions that caused this problem involved systems that pilots weren't trained on, so it's not reasonable for them to recognize what was happening and realize they can fall back on different training that they did have."

Anyway... comment I was replying to seemed to imply the existence of the stab trim cutout switches implied that the MCAS system was made known to pilots, which is why I pointed out those switches had been there forever.