I was too harsh on Ethiopian. I was being too eager to bash out a "hot take" on my phone. So, I withdraw my characterisation of them as terrible.

While Ethiopian's safety record isn't terrible, Lion Air's was/is, despite attempts to change matters. Ethiopian do have a number of ongoing issues though, and Ethopian Airlines, the ECAA, and the EAIB have some troubling tendencies to avoid introspection - perhaps since Ethiopian Airlines is a government-owned flag carrier. Consider their response [0] to the LCAA/NTSB/BEA's investigation of the Flight 409 crash: "biased, lacking evidence, incomplete and did not present the full account of the accident [..] Any characterization of our pilots contrary to the foregoing is pure fabrication that cannot stand any scrutiny". That being said, I would personally fly on Ethiopian, but I definitely have reservations about them.

With regard to both crashes, the NTSB/BEA/EAIB reports all identify crew performance as inadequate. The counter-argument is that since they hadn't seen this specific situation before, their inappropriate responses were due to a loss of situational awareness and task saturation, especially with the AOA causing an erroneous stick shaker and various confusing instrument readings. That said, in both cases, the weather was good and it was daytime, so the pilot responses are nevertheless surprising even given the erroneous instrumentation.

While it's true that MCAS doesn't resemble the most common causes of runaway trim, runaway trim can happen for lots of reasons, and not all present the same way. For example, intermittent shorts can cause rapid intermittent uncommanded trimming. In any case, the response is the same, which (paraphrased) are the memory items: disengage and do not re-engage the autopilot, disengage and do not re-engage the autothrottle, hit the trim cutout switches, hold the trim wheel, and trim manually, then follow the more detailed written procedures. Indeed, in previous flights on the Lion Air aircraft, MCAS issues had occurred and the pilots in those flights recovered using the runaway stabilizer procedure.

The reason they are memory items is because trim runaway can happen FAST and recovering a severely out-of-trim aircraft using the trim wheel is somewhere between difficult and impossible, even with light aircraft, so if the trim is ever doing something unexpected, the first instinct should be to disable AP and then stab trim cutout. The responses from the pilots in both crashes were not to do this, and indeed what they did do was strange and suggests poor CRM and insufficient training. Additionally, with Ethiopian, they hadn't properly disseminated Boeing's updated MCAS training to their pilots following the Lion Air crash.

I'm not trying to defend Boeing, as they massively fucked up, but my point is really that airline training and safety practices are very important, and for me personally, far outweigh the aircraft I'd be flying in (unless BA were trying to get me on a Tupolev). I'm also not American and have long preferred Airbus to Boeing, so I'm not saying any of this because I'm biased in favour of the US. The FAA also clearly hold some of the bag here for not properly regulating Boeing.

[0] https://corporate.ethiopianairlines.com/Press-release-open-p...