At least with respect to the Lion Air crash, it was more of an issue where a faulty instrument fed bad data to a flight control augmentation system while the airplane was in manual flight, and the crew did not diagnose the problem in a timely manner. A pitch trim runaway is a failure that would present similarly and cause a similar result on any airplane so-equipped, not just the MAX. Accordingly, once it became clear that there was a problem with uncommanded control input along the pitch axis, the crew's attention likely would have been better applied to troubleshooting that issue rather than fighting with the airplane through 25+ cycles of MCAS activation. I hate to Monday morning quarterback aviation accidents, but some context is important to avoid the notion that the 737MAX (with almost entirely hydraulically-actuated control surfaces, rather than fly-by-wire) are autonomously commanding dives out of the sky, beyond the ability of flight crews to mitigate.

Maybe mass hysteria is not the correct term, but there is a certain herd mentality to the near instant news outlets on the internet & their opinion pieces that drive people to social media. The problem is that there is such a need for content on these 24 hours news networks that they mostly fill the airspace with talking heads and their opinions, usually not many facts in the beginning. For better or worse, that does drive the herd in one direction or the other. Just look @ CNN's front page right now, the cycle is perpetuating itself. Now US Senators are calling for the grounding of the MAX 8 & I believe it is in large part to the news/social media cycle feeding on itself & needing to "follow the herd".

In regards to the MAX 8 issue at hand, it really does not affect me yet. UA is my airline of choice and only operates the MAX 9's. If I ever find my self booked or switched to a MAX 9, I would not have a problem flying on one with UA pilots. That said, hypothetically, if I was on an international itinerary & had some sort of IRROPS that required me to be routed on OAL on a MAX-8 today I would have to think about it. My main concern would be if the OAL flight & ground crews would have the requisite experience & training to safely operate the plane in any & all situations. Absent an undiscovered design flaw in the MAX series, that seems to be a HUGE part of these 2 incidents.

I agree that there is a saturation here that's screaming MAX = BAD. But even with what we do know - that the initial characteristics were similar - it's enough for it to not be irrational for people to not want to fly on them. That's my only point here. As I said, I don't know what I would decide for myself at this point.

This is difficult to conclude based on only 2 incidents. Naturally, two incidents will have many things in common, and only a subset of those things will have actually contributed to that accident. If more incidents happen, the subset will become clearer. The official investigations will point out if (in)experience was actually a factor and if a more experienced crew could have prevented the accident or not.

The interesting thing is that, if these accidents happened to involved 2 very experienced flight crews, we would tend to rule out any error on their part, while the investigators would definitely still put everything action of the crew under the magnifying glass. We as humans are biased to make judgments based on experience, but history has proven that very experienced flight crews can make poor decisions as well, meaning that (in)experience is almost never an isolated cause of an accident.

Finally, note that your OAL flight crew may very well be more experienced than your UA flight crew. In the end, it's not something I'd worry about since we as pax don't get to choose nor know the experience level of our flight crew. Probably for the better.

While I don't disagree with anything you stated above, my comment regarding "inexperience" in these 2 incidents came from what limited information we have.

In the Lion Air accident, preliminary findings definitely point to a faulty sensor that will most likely be cited as a major cause. Whether the pilots were seasoned pros or not , the inexperience/training dealing with the resulting situation and the inexperience/training of the ground crews for letting the plane fly were my concerns.

While there is hardly any information out on the Ethiopian flight, if EWR764 is correct that the FO only had 200 hours of flight time, that did introduce the question of experience of the flight crew in my mind. I realize that we all have to start somewhere & it is just bad timing that this FO ended up being in the seat & was not able to help in this emergency.

Probably not fair for me to infer these characteristics on foreign carriers that I know nothing about, but it is a bias that formed my opinion from the same internet I just complained about.

If any good comes from these tragedies please let it (or among "it") be a re-balancing of the aircraft system/software certification oversight scale. There is a massive industry lobby (GAMA et al) vying (and succeeding) to strip down oversight in a time where system/software complexity is skyrocketing. We need more (or at least as much) oversight right now, not less.

Airplanes are certified and enter service with so many problems (and even unknown/not well understood functions) that are force fed down regulators' throats by powerful OEMs (and their system suppliers) who then put way too much onus on flight crews to workaround those problems. I'm talking dozens, hundreds, or even thousands (yes, thousands) of problems PER system ranging from minor/trivial to more serious. OEMs defend those problems in isolation, but when you have that many problems how does anyone know what the cumulative effect or interrelationship of them all can be? It's impossible to analyze. Things should "just work" ... or at least work much, much better before certification/entry into service.

The FCOM for a new plane is often littered with restrictions/workarounds and I believe pilots can only memorize so much of this in addition to learning how to operate the aircraft. It's a recipe for problems.

There have been many good posts urging all not to draw conclusions at this point. Along those lines, it also makes sense not to assume poor training or experience of the ET flight crew is a HUGE part of Sunday's accident. Just as the FO with 200 hours may have been flying the plane, the captain with 8000 hours may have been at the controls. We don't know.

The great majority of air accidents have a multitude of issues which cascade into a crash. Certainly with Lion Air there was a faulty sensor. That much is known. It is also believed that the built in MCAS system took the faulty sensor reading and pitched the aircraft down. Unfortunately Boeing had not publicised the existence of this system, nor provided any training on it so, assuming that this was indeed what happened, the pilots would not have understood why the plane was pitching down. And this is one of the key points of difference between Lion Air and Ethiopian: by the time of the Ethiopian crash, the pilots will have been aware of the issue with the MCAS system and should have been trained in how to deactivate it in certain circumstances. So, the puzzle is why that didn't happen. I think it's way too early to determine whether this is because of straight pilot error, or because of systems behaving in an unexpected way. If there's any significant possibility of the latter, then the fleet needs to be grounded until the system is better understood.

Indeed, ET has an excellent reputation. I suspect that's one of the reasons why the finger is pointing more towards Boeing in this case.

I agree with others that this might be a training issue and I'm confident with UA Pilots, in fact all US based Pilots for any airline. The problem I can see is that when you decide to override the computer at 1000' AGL, and the trim has moved to a position due to a fault in info, you as a pilot have zero time to react and recover. I'm not old, but old enough and experienced enough to know that I want full control of the airplane at all times, with a quick disconnect of the Autopilot. When I engage the AP, I keep a close eye on the trim wheel, if it's moving more than I would do, I expect some serious control issues when I turn it off. That has happened to me many years ago, but thankfully in level flight in a boring 182.

I think the MCAS needs to be demystified a bit, and I'm not really the person to do it because I neither have the engineering expertise nor do I fly the 737MAX. But, what's important to understand is that the apparent flight control issue presented to the Lion Air pilots, whether caused by the MCAS activation (from a faulty sensor) or a stab trim runaway, is a scenario for which pilots were and are trained. The post-Lion Air manual and checklist revisions specifically reference the MCAS so pilots are aware of the flight control architecture of the MAX and may more easily recognize a MCAS activation, but even then, it doesn't change what pilots are supposed to do when uncommanded flight control inputs are experienced along the pitch axis. This is true whether on a 737, 757/767, 777, Airbus, etc.

See, e.g.,
While the above is not specifically a 737MAX, nor does it involve the MCAS, it is an illustration (though far from perfect, procedurally) of steps pilots would be expected to take to reestablish controlled flight in the event of a stabilizer trim malfunction... sort of like the MCAS, as currently conceived, will behave if being fed bad AOA data.

France, Germany and Iceland just joined.

SWA is allowing passenger to change their flight for free if they are worried flying the MAX. Sounds like a good PR move to me.

Germany, Ireland, and The Netherlands also.