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Ethiopian Airlines Crew Followed Procedures Before Boeing Max Crash, Early Report Says (latimes.com)
The pilots of a doomed Ethiopian Airlines jet followed all of Boeing's recommended procedures when the plane started to nose dive but still couldn't save it, according to findings from a preliminary report released Thursday by the Ethiopian government. From a report: The plane crashed just six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board. The report, based on flight data and cockpit voice recorders on the Boeing 737 Max 8, was not released in full. Boeing declined to comment pending its review of the report on the March 10 crash. The Max 8 has been under scrutiny since a Lion Air flight crashed off the coast of Indonesia under similar circumstances in October. Thursday's revelations raise questions about repeated assertions by Boeing and U.S. regulators that pilots could regain control in some emergencies by following steps that include turning off an anti-stall system designed specifically for the Max, known by its acronym, MCAS. Investigators are looking into the role of MCAS, whose functions include automatically lowering the plane's nose to prevent an aerodynamic stall. The Max has been grounded worldwide pending a software fix that Boeing is rolling out, which still needs to be approved by the Federal Aviation Administration and other regulators. Further reading: Flawed Analysis, Failed Oversight: How Boeing, FAA Certified the Suspect 737 MAX Flight Control System.
They find out that some completely different bug causes the MCAS override to stay on even if you shut it off.
Either that or that it is susceptible to external control.
737 Max Pinto?
So, to summarize:
1. Boeing self-certified that pilots certified in type did not require additional training. (Prior to the recent deregulation, they weren't allowed to self-certify.)
2. Pilots had to break out the manual during an emergency to properly control a system they were not trained to use.
3. The system either did not disengage properly, or else it reengaged automatically, contrary to well-established norms for this aircraft type.
Boeing screwed up, but it also happened because of relaxed oversight. The previous level of oversight seems more appropriate.
Perhaps the FAA Administrator who made these changes should be forced to resign. This administration has had enough turnover that the President should be capable of appointing new leadership quickly.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I'd like to RTFA, but there's no link to it. There's no link to the source of the quotation.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
The word "Report" has such an authoritative tone. According to the report...
And then you read who wrote the report. Of course they would conclude that their country, their people, their pilots were not at fault.
You see this legal positioning stuff play out over and over.
And all you can do is try to backpedal and say, no, the Ethiopian government isn't a reliable authority on the correct operation of a Boeing airplane. Then the argument goes to, well then who is?
should have bought AirBus
AF 443.
The Paris Air Show lawnmower, AF 296 (And in that one, investigators allegedly altered blackbox data to frame the pilot because heavens no, we can't have FBW impuned in the international spotlight after crashing 1 of 3 at the world's biggest airshow. Vive la France!)
The sad truth is that now Boeing is just as shitty as Airbus, because Boeing now behaves like McDonnel Douglas did. Why? It's Douglas "leadership" that took over Boeing post-merger, and now Boeing is accountant-driven, not engineer-driven. Anytime you subjugate engineering to the beancounters this happens.
I am so dissapointed with Boeing ever since the slippage started on the 787. The rollout for that one was of an empty shell, unlike all other rollouts before it. Shameful. Live it up, shareholders, live it up, your short-term greed fucked up what was America's best, most visible product.
Maybe it's time to buy Sukhoi. Or maybe Lockheed can be persuaded, they've not built any jetliners since the L1011.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
The AD which went out after the Lion Air Crash said disable the MCAS using cutoff switches. What it did not consider is that if the plane is already nose down then the aerodynamic forces are too strong to use the manual wheels to make it nose up. The AD should have specified use your electric trim yoke switches to make the trim up and then cut out the electric trim so MCAS cannot make it nose down again.
Also why is the MCAS triggering 6 minutes into a flight. Takeoff by definition is close to stall. It should be off during takeoff. If this plane cannot takeoff without MCAS then this plane is not safe. This is not a fighter jet where the pilot can eject if the software screws up or the plane goes unstable.
**Life is too short to be serious**
I was in the Navy aboard an aircraft carrier. I worked on the avionics but never serviced or knew about the anti-stall systems.
That said, I do not recall two blades on either side of the nose cones.
It sounds clunky to me. Shit that sticks out is subject to damage. Apparently, the two blades could be out of sync. There is a "double-vote yes," system that indicates when the blades are not reporting the same conditions, and a "disagree," warning light Boeing apparently provided as an "in-app," purchase.
Small-revenue airlines did not opt for the expansion pack and didn't get the fucking memo as to how to deal with a cray cray "AI" system that can fly the goddam plane better than a human.
"Stall," has a well-established definition and whatever method of detection works on other airlines is not the one Boeing uses.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Yeah, next time make sure you only have poor idiots that can't afford good lawyers in the crashing planes. In other words, if you skirt the security regulations, build all-coach planes.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nah, that's just a side effect of profit maximization. Corporations don't want to kill people. That's bad for business. There's fewer customers, and what's worse, fewer people competing for jobs so you might have to pay a living wage at some point even if you kill too many of them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Boeing and the government are so cozy at this point that what will likely happen is the executives will have to have dinner with the officials that should be in charge of busting their asses into little bitty pieces, they'll have a good laugh at all the hulabaloo and then everything will go back to standard operating.
ATTEMPTED TO RAPE A CLASSMATE
FFS, Ford wasn't his classmate, her accusation was messy at best and have changed over time on top of it.
The sad truth is that now Boeing is just as shitty as Airbus
Now I need to know when did Airbus:
1) Design a system which can decide to nosedive the plan
2) Make it depend on a single fucking sensor
3) Have guy who worked for airbus before, but is now owrking for the government, claim that sensor was supposed to fail "only" in 1 out of 100'000 cases hence it was OK to have "terminate this plane" feature depend only on that single sensor
4) After letting all that shit into production and actually killing people pretend nothing is wrong and do fucking nothing
I won't even dive into how the fuck is deadly piece of crap feature like that accompanied by only a fucking PDF being sent to pilots to read.
PS
Oh, and no more "authorities faked data" BS please.
If you're a Boeing shareholder, I'd advise to get out now, or prepare to bend over and grab your ankles.
This is going to end Boeing as a corporate entity. There is simply too much gross negligence on too many levels, and too much willful lying to get a new aircraft to be accepted as the former type to avoid re-certifying pilots.
This is going to take the company down. However, the remainders may be picked up by someone for pennies on the dollar.
All Slashdot articles place the link to the right of the headline, next to the little icons.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
It's a shame that the market position of Boeing and Airbus has very little to do with capitalism and everything to do with cronyism.
You say that like "cronyism" sprang up all by itself from the vacuum. Cronyism is the expected result of the operation of a capitalist economy without effective and strong oversight, the result of which operation is always and invariably capitalism taking over politics, democratic or otherwise. The economic mechanisms are also well understood by the economic theory: when investing in bribes and government subversion creates better returns than investing in production, a capitalist will invest in bribery and not in production. This case is a perfect illustration of the phenomenon - it was a lot more effective for Boeing to subvert the certification process than to ensure quality aircraft design. Boeing boss even had the temerity to call Trump and ask that grounding of the dangerous planes be delayed for PR reasons.
The result of the right-wing(nut) policies of oversight removal in the US are well known. Corporations have for a long time had a say over politics that the ordinary citizens don't. Even science says so:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The worst part is that US is exporting this model worldwide, damaging and weakening democratic governments all over the place.
s/of those using the planes/of those dying in the planes/
FTFY
Higuita
Why is the MCAS needed now? I understand it was there to avoid pilot training, but we are way passed that.
If it can cause issues and you have to turn it off at times why not just remove it and let the pilots do what they are supposed to and push the nose down themselves of they have to.
Of it can stall way too easily and pilots are not enough then still it would mean you have to discontinue the plane not enable MCAS.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Pilot error, and a hair raising one at that
Simultaneous overspeed and stall warnings (making the pilots believe they were in a high speed stall). Stall warning that shut up at low speed (below 60 kts) but came back on precisely when the pilots were temporarily taking the correct action, making them believe that pushing the stick was the wrong thing to do. Pilots that cannot feel what the other pilot is doing with the stick. With all the simultaneous warnings and inconsistent indications, they had no idea what information to trust anymore. Sure, with perfect hindsight it's easy to see what they did wrong, but it wasn't as clear cut as some seem to believe.
Ah, I see, you are a conspiracy nut. The envelope protection saved almost all lifes back then when the pilot actively tried to kill everyone by stalling the aircraft. Without the protection the plane would have fallen from the sky like a bloody brick, not slowly gliding on the top of the trees.
They were actually trying to demonstrate the stall protection, by flying extremely slowly right at the edge of the stall (which no pilot would ever attempt in a regular plane). The big problem was that the engines did not spool up as quickly as the pilots had expected. The conspiracy theory is about why the engines took so long to spool up: some say they got into ground idle due to a programming error, some say it was because the pilots had pulled certain circuit breakers, some say flight data recorder info was falsified, etc... I have never really dug in to the whole story, but the theories are not as nutty as they would seem at first sight.
The elevators were functioning correctly. They were at max angle of attack, any further up elevator would have stalled the plane. The problem was that the engines were not spooling up quickly enough.
Airbus did have several incidents where the plane violently pitched down because both AOA probes had iced up (because they had gone through the same area of icing conditions at the same time). Not quite as bad as Boeing relying on a single sensor, but actually harder to recover from since the only solution was shutting down two Air Data Computers using push buttons on the overhead panel. Fortunately, in each incident, the pilots could regain control when the plane reached a lower altitude and the system no longer detected a stall.
Airbus took corrective action by first adding a memorized procedure for the pilots (telling them to turn off two Air Data Computers), then correcting the software so it crosschecked the AOA probe data with airspeed, inertial reference and attitude (which is the fix that Boeing is implementing now).
It's beyond belief how Boeing could not only fail to learn from Airbus' mistakes, but actually do worse by relying on only a single sensor for something so critical (and making a crosscheck between the two available AOA probes an option for an extra price?!?!)
Also, before the first crash, pilots didn't even know the MCAS existed. It wasn't in the flight manuals. Unbelievable.
when investing in bribes and government subversion creates better returns than investing in production, a capitalist will invest in bribery and not in production.
Please be more specific. It's only bribery and corruption when it it is paid to a foreign official. It is protected speech when paid to a domestic politician.
Congress voted itself a monopoly in the taking of graft.
Have gnu, will travel.
They turned it off. Then they turned it on again. Did they get tech support on the line or what?
Have gnu, will travel.
The crew applied full power and the pilot attempted to climb. However, the elevators did not respond to the pilot's commands, because the A320's computer system engaged its "alpha protection" mode (meant to prevent the aircraft from entering a stall).
Which was exactly the right action. Stalling would've been much, much worse and that's what would've happened if the computer hadn't saved the day to the extent that it could be saved. The aircraft did not have the speed to climb so all they would've managed to do was to gain a little altitude, loose all their speed and then fall like a brick. This argument has been done to death.
Can you cite more than AF447? Because I can't find any. What I can find is multiple reports of inconsistent airspeed readings, but so far AF447 appears to be the only that actually got in trouble for it.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
It's beyond belief how Boeing could not only fail to learn from Airbus' mistakes,
This, more than anything else. The FAA reports the results of EVERY accident they investigate for this sole reason, so that we can all learn from those that have gone before us. How someone that claimed to be a professional engineer and be put in charge of a flight system that would affect the lives of hundreds of people at a time, could be so ignorant of standard best practices baffles me.
In the experimental aircraft community, we have a gentleman name Bob Nuckolls who run Aeroelectric.com. Publishes an excellent manual on aircraft wiring, and keeps an email list to answer builder's questions. Any engineer involved in flight systems that don't follow his tenants is an idiot. The first one is, "Any system required for safe completion of the flight should be as reliable as the wing spars." No electric sensor is that reliable.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
that woosh noise that sounded like a 737 max 8 knowing better than its pilots....
You mean like the one that requires me to carry a nearly useless ELT? Even though ADS-B has been mandated?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Because they weren't "sealed". They found the stuff behind maintenance access panels when they went to perform maintenance.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Unless there is some tiny print on all those tickets that say, "We're not responsible for crashing planes" or "Liablitily limited to $1M(US), collectible at Boeing Headquarters."
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
No, it was AOA probes. You're thinking about AF 447 which was a pitot problem.
Here's a description of one of the events.
And there never has been any major catastrophes in socialist countries (other than the socialism itself). Sure thing, bud. Just keep smokin' what your smokin' as we watch the Venezualans cooking their pets over trash fires.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
First you argue that oversight will be subverted by cronyism.
Then you claim that oversight is removed by cronyism.
In neither case is capitalism the problem. The problem is businesses seeking to subvert the concentration of power within government.
The worst part is your wilful ignorance that despite some major flaws, the US has been the biggest exporter of democratic governments and liberty that the world has ever seen.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
To find out what the fuck is causing all those clunks and rattles.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You and the GP still missed the critical difference, which was that Airbus at least made sure that shutting off the failing system actually shut it down. With this new info, I question whether the Max series will ever be flown again by U.S. carriers even if they somehow manage to get it re-certified.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Uh, no.
The issue is detecting the problem early enough to deal with it requires an optional warning light.
Since it's optional, third-world airlines didn't buy it. Because they're a lot poorer than first-world airlines.
On the other hand, third-world airlines are way, way, way smarter than you. So they have that going for them, which is nice.
Water drowns people. Let's ban it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
to optimize the system for maximum profit, compromising on safety. Maybe those procedures should be reviewed as well, not just the MCAS specific documentation.
Pilot error, and a hair raising one at that
Simultaneous overspeed and stall warnings (making the pilots believe they were in a high speed stall). Stall warning that shut up at low speed (below 60 kts) but came back on precisely when the pilots were temporarily taking the correct action, making them believe that pushing the stick was the wrong thing to do. Pilots that cannot feel what the other pilot is doing with the stick. With all the simultaneous warnings and inconsistent indications, they had no idea what information to trust anymore. Sure, with perfect hindsight it's easy to see what they did wrong, but it wasn't as clear cut as some seem to believe.
First off, it's AF447 and not 443.
There was no overspeed warning. The reason is quite simple: the first thing the pilot did when the autopilot disconnected was to pull on the stick. As any pilot will know, that will lower the speed. They never got it back.
The stall warning sounded at this point, correctly, as a response to the pilot's commands. It's only after that the FBW disconnected, and the stall warning stopped.
When it did resume, it's not like the pilot tried many times to push the nose down, triggering the stall warning as a result, as you seem to believe. The stall warning sounded for a whole minute during which the pilot flying kept increasing the nose up attitude. That's right at the top of the flying 101 don'ts. And all this while the alarm was screaming "don't do this".
So, basically, the plane entered a stall _because_ of unnecessary pilot actions, and stayed in stall _despite_ a constant alarm from the computer.
There's a valuable lesson here about the necessity of practising the basics of flying - when the computer can't deal. There's another one about managing panic: it still took 4 minutes for the plane to crash - there is time to think.
Blaming the computer, or Airbus, is just the one that won't actually help with anything.
Ah, I see, you are a conspiracy nut. The envelope protection saved almost all lifes back then when the pilot actively tried to kill everyone by stalling the aircraft. Without the protection the plane would have fallen from the sky like a bloody brick, not slowly gliding on the top of the trees.
They were actually trying to demonstrate the stall protection, by flying extremely slowly right at the edge of the stall (which no pilot would ever attempt in a regular plane). The big problem was that the engines did not spool up as quickly as the pilots had expected. The conspiracy theory is about why the engines took so long to spool up: some say they got into ground idle due to a programming error, some say it was because the pilots had pulled certain circuit breakers, some say flight data recorder info was falsified, etc... I have never really dug in to the whole story, but the theories are not as nutty as they would seem at first sight.
No they were actually trying to show the plane to a public that was quite incapable of understanding what "stall protection" means, during an airshow at an airport too small for the A320 to operate from (and not in Paris, as you seem to believe). Black boxes and a concurring audio analysis show that the engines spooled up as per spec. If the pilots "expected" them to do so faster, that's their mistake. In any case, while the 10m slow flyby might still have worked out, the nail in the coffin appears to be that the pilots didn't see the forest beyond the runway.
Yep. With a warp drive, they would have made it. And without the computer preventing them from doing so, they would have stalled the plane, crashed much harder, with more than 3 casualties.
Back in reality, the engine spooled up as they were designed and certified to. Faster, actually.
The problem, then, is the pilots not having a clue what to expect from the engines. Or, alternatively, that you don't do a 10m flyby at idle before pushing the throttles 5 seconds away from the forest in front of you.
That's great; you just modded up a bunch of bullshit because you thought I sounded interesting. Congrats.
Boieng is hardly unique there. I've worked on fleets from two other manufacturers on which we found tools and rags in places they weren't supposed to be.
The FAA reports the results of EVERY accident they investigate for this sole reason,
The FAA doesn't investigate aircraft accidents. That's the job of the NTSB.
so that we can all learn from those that have gone before us
The same thing happened last October, the FAA issued an emergency AD covering the issue, Boeing sent messages to every customer. The second crash should never have happened because the information was disseminated last November. Plenty of time for training. But ...
"Any system required for safe completion of the flight should be as reliable as the wing spars."
The AoA sensor is not required for safe completion of any flight. How do all those airplanes that don't have any AoA sensors manage to stay aloft without them, hmm?
You mean like the one that requires me to carry a nearly useless ELT?
An ELT is only required for certain operations.
Even though ADS-B has been mandated?
ADS-B out is only mandated for operations in certain airspaces.
You clearly don't understand the difference between ADS-B out and an ELT if you think ADS-B out is designed to cover for the other. If you think otherwise, will you be happy to get a phone call from the FAA or FSDO or flight service when they notice that your ADS-B out shows zero forward speed after you've landed? There really is a difference between sitting on the ramp and sitting in a swamp with serious injuries.
Actually, AF447 did not pitch down. You might want to look at QF72, in which the incident was not caused by icing, but by a quite strange signalling condition from air data inertial reference units that the flight computer software interpreted incorrectly. LH1829 did pitch down because of two frozen angle of attack sensors. I do not know about other incidents.
the US has been the biggest exporter of democratic governments and liberty
LOL. You must be as indoctrinated as you're stupid and ignorant.
So? The pilot clearly ignored the procedure where once one pilot says "I have control" and gets it acknowledged he should keep his paws off the controls. And besides, the airplane told them both loud and clear "dual control". They ignored it as well.
If it wasn't as clear cut, why was the captain able to instantly recognise the situatuon at hand as soon as he reentered the cockpit?
Yes, and they were doing it at the third of the planned altitude. Why? Because the pilot flying didn't recognise he was flying too low even though the numbers were right at the bloody PFD. I guess he was getting a blowjob from the pilot monitoring, that would maybe excuse both pilots from looking at the altitude indicator.
Well, duh. All jet engines take their time to spool up from flight idle to full power. This has been known by any jet pilot since the Heinkel He 178 had its first take off in 1939. First to ensure smooth airflow in the compressor so it won't stall (that's like backfire, only worse and can destroy the engine) and second, modern aircraft have high bypass turbofans and they simply have more inertia. So, 12 seconds to spool up and even at full power the aircraft would keep sinking for a few seconds because inertia is a bitch.
All the conspiracy theories are just the pilot trying to distract form his mistakes.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
It really was shut down, but they reenabled it because they needed to trim the nose back up.
The only way to stop the MCAS from trimming down, is by cutting power to the electric trim. But now they still couldn't get the nose back up because the plane had been trimmed down and they couldn't trim it back up without the electric trim. Manual trim is too slow and possibly even blocked because of the high aerodynamic forces on the jack screw caused by combined down trim and up elevator.
Since they couldn't get the nose back up and manual trim didn't work, they decided to reenable the electric trim to try and trim back up. But as soon as they did that, MCAS trimmed down even further.
I stand corrected, apparently there was no overspeed warning. But the speed indications were fluctuating wildly, and the altimeter was initially going down (due to icing), which prompted the flying pilot to pull the nose up. There were lots of conflicting indications, and at some point the flight director (which had initially disappeared) came back on with a pitch up command to climb at 6000 fpm! (Yes, one of the initial items on the unreliable airspeed checklist is to switch the flight directors off, but since they had already disappeared, they did not think of this step).
A good explanation from a pilot's point of view is here. It doesn't just explain what the pilots did wrong, but also what they were probably thinking at that point.
By the way, both pilots flew small airplanes in their free time. They did have the necessary basic flying skills, they just did not believe they were in a stall. They thought the stall warning was caused by incorrect speed indications, and the increased aerodynamic noise seemed to point towards excessive speed rather than a lack of speed.
As for the airshow crash, the whole point of the conspiracy theorists is that some parts of the report were faked to hide the fact that the engines did not spool up quickly enough. I'm not saying it's true, just explaining what the controvercy is about. Nobody is saying there was anything wrong with the elavators afaik. They were deliberately flying at max AOA to show off the airplane flying at extremely low speed.
The question whether a corporation cares about a law can be answered by a simple equation: If the revenue for breaking the law is higher than the chance of getting caught times the fine to pay when caught, ignore the law. Then it's just part of the operating cost.
People dying isn't necessarily a no-go either. If you can somehow turn it into a "regrettable oversight", maybe add some human error and then threaten to dump a few thousand unemployed on the streets if you're fined more than the equivalent of a finger waggling and a "no, no, no, naughty corporation!", why bother caring about human lives?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
- No one told them to firewall the throttles. Excessive speed made trimming more difficult.
- No one told them to turn the malfunctioning MCAS back on, which put the aircraft into its final fatal dive.
Simultaneous overspeed and stall warnings (making the pilots believe they were in a high speed stall).
To which the pilots responded to by giving the aircraft conflicting instructions and turning off the stall alarm. The incident was ruled to be pilot error over technical failure (which was the pitot tube issue that Airbus then fixed).
Thus far, the A330 has had 2 fatal incidents since it's introduction in 1992 with a combined total fatalities of under 300, both due to pilot error. The B737 max has had 2 fatal incidents with the same cause within six months of each other since it's launch in 2016, combined total fatalities of over 350, both due to the same computer error.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Simultaneous overspeed and stall warnings (making the pilots believe they were in a high speed stall).
To which the pilots responded to by giving the aircraft conflicting instructions and turning off the stall alarm. The incident was ruled to be pilot error over technical failure (which was the pitot tube issue that Airbus then fixed).
They did not turn off the stall alarm. It turned off itself when speed dropped below 60 kts. Then, the few times when the pilots started to take the correct action by pushing the nose down, speed increased above 60 kts again and the stall warning was reactivated. Which gave them the false impression that they were doing something wrong, and stopped pushing the stick.
Thanks. I read that detail a few minutes after I posted that comment. So it's more accurate to say that Boeing didn't make sure that the plane would actually be recoverable after following their shutdown procedure.
I find it absolutely appalling that Boeing never tested their procedure in a real aircraft under anything even approaching the trim state that the first doomed plane got into. Obviously they couldn't test a failing MCAS, but Boeing could have easily electrically commanded that much trim by hand and then tried to manually trim the aircraft back to a stable flight envelope. If they had tried that, they would have instantly recognized that it was not possible, reenabled the electric trim, landed the plane, and ordered the fleet to be grounded until the problem could be rectified. This effectively means Boeing didn't test the procedure at all; they did not even test things that would be relatively trivial and safe to test.
But even worse than the lack of testing is the realization that if there are still bugs in MCAS, the current hardware clearly does not provide any way to override MCAS safely. That would still be an unacceptable safety violation even if Boeing's hadn't already failed to adequately diagnose and provide workarounds for the MCAS problem, even if the design of MCAS weren't fundamentally flawed, etc.
IMO, no matter what changes Boeing makes to the software, the FAA should refuse to certify this aircraft until Boeing adds a separate MCAS Disable switch, and those of us in the flight path of major airports should use whatever legal avenues are at our disposal to ensure that these planes remain grounded until the problem is fixed in hardware. At this point, a software-only fix simply will not fly.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The FAA doesn't investigate aircraft accidents. That's the job of the NTSB.
You'd best tell these guys then: https://www.faa.gov/about/offi...