They were not told the main details about their plane, they had no notion of the mcas so they were in a major disadvantage.
Yes, you and others and the media have said this repeatedly. I'm saying something different, as a pilot: it is not relevant. Airplanes at their core, are simple machines. They are objects that are pushed or pulled through the air by engines, and which can change their shape in certain ways to control where they go. That's it. The whole ball of wax. There is a lot of automation in modern aircraft, and pilots, to various degrees, know how it works, or don't. Generally, they know how to use it. They don't know what decisions were made when the software was written, what hidden conditions and failure modes are buried in it. They just don't.
In this case, literally one of the SIMPLEST aspects of the aircraft was out of control: the stabilizer trim. This is controlled, physically, by a prominent and loud wheel in the cockpit, and such wheels are present on just about every aircraft (some trim the elevator, some trim the stabilizer itself). There is nothing mysterious about this.
Better pilots would have stopped this cold.
And as I have said many many times in this thread, that doesn't mean that MCAS is not forked up, or that Boeing didn't screw up. But the pilots still screwed up, and in an obvious way.
You now sound like that board of inquiry from the movie Sully, why did you not directly go to the nearby airport, simulations have proven you could have made it.
Yeah right if you knew right away what was wrong , how much time you had left and made the right decision in a split second.
What is this 10 second nonsense? This plane oscillated more than 20 times over 10 minutes. This is nothing like the Sully movie.
And by the way, I would love to know what Sullenberger would think of this accident. I have a strong suspicion that in pilot's lounges around the world, 737 drivers are mad at Boeing, but also wondering how those crews could have screwed the pooch so badly.
I find it harsh to blame a dead crew when they had no information about the cause of the problem in the first place. Add the complete confusion because the plane responds totally different than expected.
It is harsh. Airplanes are dangerous and judge mistakes harshly. That is the nature of aviation.
How do you turn something off if no one told you it existed and also not told you how to turn it off, if it can be turned off at all ?
Jumpin' Jesus on a pogo stick! They didn't have to turn off the MCAS! They had to turn off the trim system, which of course, they knew about. It's a motor that drives one the basic flight control surfaces of the machine.