The high speed and the jet's forward-leaning posture made it nearly impossible to use the controls to pull the nose up.
The first time the MCAS software kicked in, flight data shows the Ethiopian Airlines pilots reacted quickly by flicking switches under their thumbs - they had recognised the movements as the same type flight crews had been warned about after the Lion Air crash.
This time, the pilots countered MCAS to greater effect, the experts said after studying the data. But when they turned off the system - as they were instructed to do by Boeing and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in the wake of the Lion Air disaster - the nose was still trimmed downwards, making it harder to pull up the plane.
In the meantime, the aircraft's speed remained abnormally high, the five pilots and four aviation experts said. "As pilots have told us, erroneous activation of the MCAS function can add to what is already a high-workload environment," Muilenburg said Thursday, adding Boeing was"sorry for the lives lost" in the crash."It's our responsibility to eliminate this risk. We own it and we know how to do it."
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