Its clearly more nuanced than that. We can ask ourselves why they didn't do this, that or the other, but I don't think anyone has proventhat any of the other theoretical actions on their part would have resulted in a safe ending.

I'll happily concede I'm wrong the day any pilot gets into a simulator or real plane and demonstrates that a simpler solution obvious to every 7M8 pilot was staring the ET pilots in the face. But if this is one of those cases where only a handful of elite pilots (paging Chuck Yeager) could save the day, then I don't think it's fair to criticize random pilots for not being Chuck Yeager. The vast majority of pilots, even in Canada, aren't.

In any event, debating the pilots' choices belongs on an ET 302 thread. They serve little purpose here other than to obfuscate against legitimate concerns about the 7M8's airworthiness. No matter what they could or should have done, 7M8s should not have been in the air either in Ethiopia or in Canada when that incident happened. And with any luck, they'll stay on the ground till EASA (or someone equally credible) has run a fine comb over them.

I don't care for ad hominem as but maybe you're right. Maybe I'm missing the point. I just really don't understand how anyone can comment on whether the ET pilots got it "right" or "wrong" if no one knows what the "right" way was. Maybe there was no "right" way and they were doomed all along. In which case, why bring them up?

Said it before and I'll say it again: the pilot issue is a red herring on this thread. The issue here is that the 7M8 is/was not airworthy in its current form. The only way the pilots become relevant here is if one believes they are the critical variable that could change everything - I.e. replacing them with an AC pilot would result in a different outcome and/or the 7M8 not being grounded in Canada.

I think(?) we agree that that is not the case. So why dwell on it? Motives notwithstanding, it comes across as deflection and obfuscation. I've become wary of that. It was, after all, the insistence "questioning" what JT and its pilots were doing/had done, that led to this grounding being postponed in the first place.

Lovely to go right to racism, but I think it was more that Air Canada purchased all available safety systems and many overseas airlines did not.

Alternatively, it could be related to what Mentourpilot (and, apparently, his associate from Leeham) express concern/frustration about in this video (1:26 in - watch for about 30-40 seconds).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q17vykscK0w

If one can't be bothered to watch, he objects to the way people people are claiming or implying that North American pilots or European pilots are inherently superior to, say, each and every African pilot. Wouldn't be surprised if this trend was reflected in posts here. It's lazy stereotyping, and IMHO it's one of the reasons 7M8s were still flying when the ET incident happened.

No smoke without fire and all that.

As for safety systems, if they're critical safety systems, why were they optional, and why weren't they retrofitted on to every 7M8 immediately after JT610? Good for AC for buying them, but I get the sense that they don't actually fix the MCAS issue. Hence Boeing preparing a software fix that AC didn't have when it released that (ill-advised, in retrospect) statement about 7M8 safety two days before being told to ground them. Never did figure out why AC felt the need to adopt that position so early. Why didn't they wait till more information became available?

Just before the preliminary report was publicly issued, Ethiopian Airlines and the Ethiopian Ministry of Transport engaged in a spin campaign via PR and social media basically saying that the preliminary report exonerated their pilots and pinned 100% of the blame on Boeing. This was picked up and repeated unchallenged by many media outlets and repeated here in this thread. I raised the point about the pilots actions just to point out this is nonsense; the preliminary report points to a complex interaction between hardware, software and people. Rarely if ever are aviation accidents attributed to a single factor in the final report. This is a simple fact.

@RatherBeInYOW: Not to put too fine a point on it, but there were a few folk here who insisted this was all pilot error and no 7M8 issue. Admittedly they've gone awfully quiet in recent days.