Look, take it up with Boeing, not me. Here's the runaway stab trim checklist from 2018, before the accident [1].
Right at the very top, it says:
Condition: Uncommanded stabilizer trim movement occurs continuously.
MCAS produces an intermittent fault, not a continuous one, therefore you are not supposed to run that checklist.
There should be a checklist for MCAS failure, and the system and its failure modes should be explained, like every other system on a 737, but Boeing deliberately decided not to.
To your point, yes, you'd better pay attention in training. But, in order for that training to be of any use, they can't keep aircraft systems that can fail and kill you a secret from the pilots!
edit: Further to your point about the overspeed, the overspeed was not caused by the thrust levers being at full. The overspeed was caused by MCAS pushing the nose down and causing the plane to pick up speed. The pilots were trying to get the nose back up. The difficulty in moving the wheel comes from a combination of the airspeed and how far out of trim the plane is. Both of these problems were caused by MCAS putting in nose down trim. Yes, the pilots could have throttled back and bought themselves a little more time, but that is not the primary reason that they were unable to turn the trim wheel.
> MCAS produces an intermittent fault, not a continuous one, therefore you are not supposed to run that checklist.
Again, if you're a pilot and want to live, stop parsing sentences like Bill CLinton and parse them like a pilot. Remember, I worked on the 757 trim system. I guarantee you that everyone there would ridicule your interpretation. Do you really imagine it has to run all the way to the stops to satisfy you that it is runaway?
> they can't keep aircraft systems that can fail and kill you a secret from the pilots!
The pilot had everything he needed to know to save the airplane. He did not need to know the cause of the runaway trim, just how to stop it.
> the overspeed was not caused by the thrust levers being at full
When you're in a dive, it behooves you to pull the thrust levers back (and they were at full). Overspeed can tear the airplane apart. It just takes a second to pull the levers back, and reducing the airspeed would have made their attempts at manual trim workable.
Frankly, if I was teaching ground school and encountered a student who made arguments like yours, I'd wash him out. I'm reminded of that episode of The Office where the characters were driving using navigator software. The software directed them to drive into a swamp, and the characters were arguing over whether they should follow the directions into the swamp or not. There's a reason that airliners still have pilots in them and not have computers run it all.
I understand your point, but I have a little different perspective.
Pilots are not engineers. Airline pilots are not test pilots. They drill the procedures, and they follow them. We'd all like to have Neil Armstrong flying our plane, instinctually solving unexpected problems in seconds, but there aren't enough Neil Armstrongs out there to meet the demand for air travel. The solution that we've come up with is standardized procedures, and to have a procedure for every critical failure mode.
Boeing, for commercial reasons, did not want there to be a procedure for this failure mode. 737 pilots run the trim runaway scenario in the simulator, and they could easily have added a scenario for MCAS failure, but that would have cost Boeing considerable cash and they decided not to do it.
The simple fact is that you had two crews that were trained to Boeing standards crash, and as far as we know, only one survive.
If it had been just one crash and many successful recoveries, you'd be on a much stronger footing to argue that "oh, it's just those developing world airlines with their substandard pilots." When it's a 67% fatality rate though, you can't just blame the crew.
Right at the very top, it says:
Condition: Uncommanded stabilizer trim movement occurs continuously.
MCAS produces an intermittent fault, not a continuous one, therefore you are not supposed to run that checklist.
There should be a checklist for MCAS failure, and the system and its failure modes should be explained, like every other system on a 737, but Boeing deliberately decided not to.
To your point, yes, you'd better pay attention in training. But, in order for that training to be of any use, they can't keep aircraft systems that can fail and kill you a secret from the pilots!
[1] http://www.b737.org.uk/images/runawaystab2013.jpg
edit: Further to your point about the overspeed, the overspeed was not caused by the thrust levers being at full. The overspeed was caused by MCAS pushing the nose down and causing the plane to pick up speed. The pilots were trying to get the nose back up. The difficulty in moving the wheel comes from a combination of the airspeed and how far out of trim the plane is. Both of these problems were caused by MCAS putting in nose down trim. Yes, the pilots could have throttled back and bought themselves a little more time, but that is not the primary reason that they were unable to turn the trim wheel.