A couple of factors played into this. Terrible maintenance (well known issue with this airline). Seriously, a plane in US is HIGHLY unlikely to fly this many t

A couple of factors played into this. Terrible maintenance (well known issue with this airline). Seriously, a plane in US is HIGHLY unlikely to fly this many times with this type of issue. So in the US, risk of this even happening is MUCH lower. We don't hear about the situations pilots respond properly too. Despite the other person correcting me, most pilots do know this stuff in US. Go arounds, single engine landings, stab trim cutout etc all happen with some frequency. Runaway stabilizer has a cutout switch and wheel for a reason, the manual control you describe. It's actually a memory item - memory or recall items are used for time critical situations with risks of severe aircraft damage. You do the memory items and then look at checklist. There are not that many. My own view here - despite what others are saying, if pilots had cut out the electric trim, they would have been fine. 99% of time flights go per the plan and are boring, so pilots do sometimes take shortcuts. They don't brief the flight properly, they don't maintain a sterile cockpit, they don't look over past issues on a plane before takeoff (maintenance log book) and they don't follow procedures exactly. Planes are so safe a lot of pilots lean HEAVILY on the automation. So I'd be very curious about cockpit voice recorder. It seems almost impossible to go 12 minutes without doing the 20 second memory item. An example - properly using an elevator - you hit the button, when doors open, you enter. If doors closing you hit the button outside again or hit the door hold button inside and then enter or WAIT if doors don't open. The sensors in the door to avoid crushing you are meant as a backup. BUT, folks are so confident in those backup sensors they skip the procedure, and actually stick their hand into a closing door on purpose to keep it open. It works 99% of time I'm sure - but there will be that .01% where it doesn't. That's like flying. 99.999% it actually works if you take a shortcut (ie, in many cases you can cut out trim with control column input). But that IS NOT the actual procedure. So you see pilots say things like, "I've always done it this way", and yeah, it works 99.9% of the time BUT the designers intended you to follow the damn procedure - in which case you'll almost never have a problem. Another problem, you remember what you do. So if you are used to cutting out stab trim with control column as a shortcut and not switches, then yes, you could be in trouble here, especially if you never fall back to the actual procedure. There was a change here which mean more cases in which stab trim would be flight commanded and some shortcuts wouldn't work on it.