Re: Negligent certification
This style of response upsets me.
Basically what you are saying is that, in the event of this system failing and trying to nose-dive the aircraft into the ground and kill everyone on board, if nothing else is going on and the cockpit is quiet, there is a procedure to handle the situation.
Now assume you are climbing towards mountains, and your airspeed indicators are bollocksed. You think you are going too fast, so you withdraw the flaps. Your angle of attack rapidly increases, then the stick-shaker activates, there are voices shouting "DON'T SINK! DON'T SINK!", "TERRAIN! TERRAIN! TERRAIN!", "STALL! STALL! STALL!" or similar. The noise of the stall warning horn is blaring out, the yolk is shaking aggressively. Meanwhile the nose of the plane keeps being forced down. Your airspeed is increasing, but you don't know how fast you're going. You disable auto-trim, and there's a temporary lapse where you get the nose back up, bu all the stall warnings continue, so your reflex is not to pull up hard. The nose drops again. You are pulling back on the stick with around 50kg of force, which should also disable all auto-trim and autopilot (as it did on previous 737s) but by that point you are only 1000ft above ground level, your instruments are still reading nonsense, you have no fucking clue why the plane is nosediving and you can't pull the stick back any harder. There is a quiet clickity click noise from the trim wheel, which you already disabled but for some god-forsaken reason it's going again. You're in a nose-dive, 40 degrees down, 500ft above the rapidly approaching mountains.
That all happens in about 2 minutes, in the case of Ethiopia.
Yes, it might be possible to (temporarily) disable the system. No doubt an exceptional crew might handle the situation better. But you know what? Blaming the pilots here is not how you prevent this shitstorm happening again.