Training is an issue, because the pilots had at their fingertips the means to recover from the malfunction (turning off the stab trim via the cutoff switches).
The plane was traveling fast enough that the strain on the air control surfaces meant pilots weren't able to manually trim the plane back into alignment.
The only way to overcome those forces was to use the electronic motors to adjust the alignment of the rear stabilizer trim. However, those motors also are disabled with the stab trim cutoff switches.
After the fact simulations confirmed that such forces could well have prevented manual control.
There's no evidence MCAS upset looks exactly like runaway trim in every case, most cases, some cases, or these specific cases. This is a supposition made only by Boeing, and repeated by others. What has since been demonstrated is it's possible for MCAS upset to result in a mistrim significant enough the pilots can't recover in time if they're at a low enough altitude.
So I reject the categorical claim they could have recovered with the flip of a switch.
Further to that point, the preliminary report on ET302 shows they did turn stabilizer trim switches to cutoff, and yet they couldn't move trim manually, likely due to mistrim forces. The logical reason why they turned stabilizer trim back on is it was the only way to get electric motor assisted trim to try and get out of the mistrim. But MCAS immediately triggered again resulting in greater than 20 degrees nose down, and negative G forces by the pilots - it was impossible to recover from that. The final act of MCAS, had it been a human pilot, for sure would be considered a saboteur, it's that ridiculous of a reaction under any circumstance, even had the airplane angle of attack been great enough to trigger MCAS it was a gross overreaction, at low altitude, commanding a path steeply below the horizon, and incompatible with survival.
> There's no evidence MCAS upset looks exactly like runaway trim in every case
If uncommanded trim motor action is forcing the airplane into a dangerous dive, it's runaway trim. The pilots must have thought it was runaway trim as they were desperately trying to counter it.
> So I reject the categorical claim they could have recovered with the flip of a switch.
But that's what did happen with the previous LA flight that landed safely.
> it was the only way to get electric motor assisted trim to try and get out of the mistrim.
That's right.
> But MCAS immediately triggered again
The electric trim switches override the MCAS.
So why didn't the EA pilots do that override? I don't know, neither do you. We'll have to see what the NTSB report says.
Should those training processes not be blamed? After all, it wasn’t Southwest Airlines that crashed and the sketchy founder of Lion Air certainly didn’t have safety as a core value.
The weird remarks about Ethiopia were quite out of place, Ethiopian Airlines has an excellent safety record. It's also telling that Ted Cruz insisted very quickly after the second crash that the MAX be grounded, it would be have very bad for his career if one had crashed in Dallas and he had declared them safe.