The whole point of the 737 max was that the pilots wouldn't be trained on the "max" part of the 737 -- they were qualified for the 737 and there's some hidden emulator making the "max" fly like a 737.
As soon as the emulator got bad feedback from the one sensor that was used to map "max" airframe behavor to "737" controls, all bets were off. And because the pilots weren't allowed to know they were in a Max not a 737 (which would require further training that would void the advantages of the Max) there was no SOP for how to deal with "your Max is blind and can't pretend to be a 737"
The "poorly trained" pilots weren't test pilots -- pilots aren't supposed to be able to improvise and react to things off book.
“Undertrained” because Boeing told them extra training g wasn’t necessary.[1]
Both pilots had multiple thousands of flight hours (well beyond the minimum 1500 required to co-pilot in the US). Only the co-pilot of the Ethiopian Air flight would have been deemed too new to fly for a US airline (and even then, only post-Colgan Air 3407).
IIRC the FO (copilot) of the Ethiopian Air flight correctly identified MCAS as the source of the problem, but was struggling to trim the airplane manually because it was so far out of trim that the load on the horizontal stabilizer jackscrew made it difficult or impossible for him to adjust.
This possibility was mentioned in the AFM, but the recommended response - pitch nose-down to decrease the load - was not feasible in the situation.
I thought the story was that the normal training should have sufficed, and that it did in some cases where the same issue occurred and the pilots were able to handle it (themselves not having any special training either).
The argument was that the problem could be handled as any other pitch-trim runaway situation, for which pilots were already trained.
There were, however, reasons to be skeptical. Firstly, unlike in most other cases, it was not designed to halt when opposed by the pilot’s use of the control yoke (to do so would defeat the purpose of MCAS.) Secondly, it was found in flight testing that MCAS needed to be made much more aggressive, yet the original decision was allowed to stand. Thirdly, it could stop on its own accord, only to start up again a few seconds later.
Consequently, while MCAS failure is nominally handled as a form of trim runaway, it did not present itself to pilots like the trim runaway scenarios they had trained for.
So it seems like successfully handling the situation hinges on how much the pilots have abstracted the training vs applying it by rote. This abstract vs rote distinction is a common theme in Westerners looking down on other cultures, so I guess it lines up with the “third world” comments on the situation.
Except in the second crash, as I recall it, the problem was correctly IDed, but manually adjusting the trim was impossible without adding nose down (to unload the control surface). This led the co-pilot to re-enable auto-trim, which re-enabled MCAS, which then drove the plane into the ground.
There may have been a path to saving the aircraft, but it definitely didn't seem at all intuitive. And figuring it out while the plane is actively trying to crash itself is a pretty big ask.
If a successful resolution of the problem depended on pilots making the right abstractions from their training for prior versions, then that would, in itself, establish that it was a serious error to withhold information about how MCAS operated.
I am also very familiar with both catastrophic failures of 737 MAX and I can be extremely certain that undertrained pilot is only one of the factor. Boeing's extremely fail-unsafe and irredundant design of MCAS causes the failure in the first place, and they do not provide enough training material related to this system (in the first incidence they providie not training at all. MCAS is not even mentioned in the pilot's manual, nor does most maintainence crew know the existence of such system). Blaming people, especially pilot, is the easiest way to end an air crash investigation, but the industry will never be safer if nobody take the root cause seriously.
Except no, at the time of the second crash, there had been over 20 reports of un-commanded nose down inputs by pilots. The two flights just didn't manage to diagnose the issue or turn off MCAS before it crashed the aircraft.
There was IIRC 8~16 hours of training that was intended to be mandated, but Boeing told airlines that training was not necessary. So many (not all) pilots never learned the deeper mechanisms of MCAS. This would reduce costs, and increase desirability of the aircraft.
But it gets even worse! The FAA approved Boeing's request to remove a description of MCAS from the aircraft manual! So no, most pilots wouldn't even be able to learn about it even if they wanted to!
There was 0 redundancy. The MCAS was directed by ONE SINGLE AoA (Angle of Attack) SENSOR! No backups!
Even worse! Boeing was aware of the problems as of 2016! They even knew MCAS violated Boeing's own design documents and rules for the max8!
And yet here you are blaming the pilots instead of the money grubbers at the top.
There's absolutely no way it was a more dangerous form of travel than driving.
I am intimately familiar with both catastrophic failures of the 737 Max, which involved undertrained pilots from third world airlines.