I'm struggling to see how you think having to make manual adjustments every 30 seconds is "under control". Check the flight profile, it was never under control.

I'm struggling to see how you think having to make manual adjustments every 30 seconds is "under control". Check the flight profile, it was never under control. Every time MCAS trimmed down, the pilot trimmed up which resulted in two things: MCAS stopped trimming down, and the stabilizer was adjusted up. That's not a runaway situation. What did the pilots on the four previous flights encounter? The previous pilots ran into MCAS trimming the stabilizer down inappropriately. They wrote it up as a speed trim (STS) failure. The crew on the fatal flight read STS and was probably thinking STS when they crashed. Unlike the undocumented MCAS inputs, STS can be disabled by moving the control column. Did they not follow procedure correctly by overriding it? There was no procedure, MCAS was undocumented. Manual trim would only get adjusted a only few times during a regular flight You're almost never going to crank the trim wheels by hand but an NG pilot may be used to having to add input to counter STS. The process to manually override trim on a 737 that should have been followed: The pilots were presented with more than just uncommanded trim adjustments, they were presented with multiple, seemingly unrelated, failures. The failed AoA measurement meant they had no idea how fast they were going (new behavior on the MAX, see the repeated queries they made to the ATC), one of the stick shakers was going off (unsure if plane is going to stall and fall out of the sky), and there was probably a warning about the "elevator feel" system on EICAS like on the previous flight. When faced only with uncommanded trim, sure, they probably would've thought STS because that's the only system Boeing bothered to document. In an ideal world the pilots would've recognized that this wasn't STS. In reality the pilots were busy triaging a variety of symptoms because Boeing did not make appropriate warning / status indications standard equipment on the MAX nor did Boeing actually document that MCAS exists (except in Brazil). The only error that the Lion Air crew made was in not being clairvoyant.