You aren’t the CEO of Boeing by any chance, are you? That was his argument initially too.
The answer is that there was a window of a few seconds in which it could be done. But it was not reasonable to expect any pilots, other than ones who were prewarned that it was happening (i.e. the Boeing test pilots) to know what was happening in that time frame. The overwhelming power of the rate that Boeing had given to MCAS, meant that even if you were able to trim against it, you were in about a 5 to 1 battle (its rate vs yours). The aircraft will pitch down, and need even more trim, if you reduce the power.
Added to that, even though in many ways it’s a runaway trim (and that was my thought initially), the standard initial response to runway trim was actually deactivated by Boeing (and also not promulgated). So, by the time you’d worked out that it wasn’t runaway trim, but MCAS (and when the second accident happened, Boeing still hadn’t released enough information to reliably do this), those 3-5 seconds would be long gone.
According to some news sources (!), the regulators actually walked out of the last meeting with Boeing, after they continued to obfuscate on a number of items. I really wonder if at least some of them aren’t getting close to demanding the aircraft be totally recertified....something that is probably not possible. Imagine making a 1965 car fulfil all of the modern vehicle requirements.
I guess one thing that you can be sure of, is that Boeing won’t be getting much in the way of leeway with the 777X.
