NYT: Boeing Was Certifying Its Own Safety For the 737 Max (msn.com) 166
Boeing's 737 Max was built with "effectively neutered" oversight, writes the New York Times, citing interviews with over a dozen current and former employees at America's Federal Aviation Agency.
Their damning conclusion? The agency "had never independently assessed the risks of the dangerous software known as MCAS when they approved the plane in 2017." The regulator had been passing off routine tasks to manufacturers for years, with the goal of freeing up specialists to focus on the most important safety concerns. But on the Max, the regulator handed nearly complete control to Boeing, leaving some key agency officials in the dark about important systems like MCAS, according to the current and former employees...The company performed its own assessments of the system, which were not stress-tested by the regulator.
Turnover at the agency left two relatively inexperienced engineers overseeing Boeing's early work on the system. The F.A.A. eventually handed over responsibility for approval of MCAS to the manufacturer. After that, Boeing didn't have to share the details of the system with the two agency engineers...
Late in the development of the Max, Boeing decided to expand the use of MCAS, to ensure the plane flew smoothly. The new, riskier version relied on a single sensor and could push down the nose of the plane by a much larger amount. Boeing did not submit a formal review of MCAS after the overhaul. It wasn't required by F.A.A. rules... The agency ultimately certified the jet as safe, required little training for pilots and allowed the plane to keep flying until a second deadly Max crash, less than five months after the first.... By 2018, the F.A.A. was letting the company certify 96 percent of its own work, according to an agency official.
The article ends by describing the days after the first 737 Max crash, when Boeing executives visited the regulatory agency's headquarters in Seattle.
"The officials sat incredulous as Boeing executives explained details about the system that they didn't know."
Their damning conclusion? The agency "had never independently assessed the risks of the dangerous software known as MCAS when they approved the plane in 2017." The regulator had been passing off routine tasks to manufacturers for years, with the goal of freeing up specialists to focus on the most important safety concerns. But on the Max, the regulator handed nearly complete control to Boeing, leaving some key agency officials in the dark about important systems like MCAS, according to the current and former employees...The company performed its own assessments of the system, which were not stress-tested by the regulator.
Turnover at the agency left two relatively inexperienced engineers overseeing Boeing's early work on the system. The F.A.A. eventually handed over responsibility for approval of MCAS to the manufacturer. After that, Boeing didn't have to share the details of the system with the two agency engineers...
Late in the development of the Max, Boeing decided to expand the use of MCAS, to ensure the plane flew smoothly. The new, riskier version relied on a single sensor and could push down the nose of the plane by a much larger amount. Boeing did not submit a formal review of MCAS after the overhaul. It wasn't required by F.A.A. rules... The agency ultimately certified the jet as safe, required little training for pilots and allowed the plane to keep flying until a second deadly Max crash, less than five months after the first.... By 2018, the F.A.A. was letting the company certify 96 percent of its own work, according to an agency official.
The article ends by describing the days after the first 737 Max crash, when Boeing executives visited the regulatory agency's headquarters in Seattle.
"The officials sat incredulous as Boeing executives explained details about the system that they didn't know."
Some companies are best left to die... (Score:5, Insightful)
..and McDonnell-Douglas was one of them. God damn it, their shit management has destroyed Boeing. Good job, assholes.
I expect to see more of this, this cancer caused by Mergers and Aqcuisicions.
American Airlines is shit now because post-US Scare (US Air) merger, it was US Air management that took over. The Crandall-era AA is long gone, and now the cancer shows.
Maybe the doomsayers are right and we're headed to disaster shortly.. now is the hangover from all the shit decisions in the 80's and 90's.
External auditing removes a class of risks (Score:4, Insightful)
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Maybe the doomsayers are right and we're headed to disaster shortly
Nah, we're just going to muddle through things, like always.
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..and McDonnell-Douglas was one of them. God damn it, their shit management has destroyed Boeing. Good job, assholes.
I expect to see more of this, this cancer caused by Mergers and Aqcuisicions.
American Airlines is shit now because post-US Scare (US Air) merger, it was US Air management that took over. The Crandall-era AA is long gone, and now the cancer shows.
Maybe the doomsayers are right and we're headed to disaster shortly.. now is the hangover from all the shit decisions in the 80's and 90's.
I don't know which AA you were flying on, but they've been the shithole of the sky since at least 2008. Probably longer than that. US Air was slightly (and I mean a minuscule amount) better because they at least had newer airframes.
Regulation and the market (Score:5, Insightful)
The 737 MAX will be the go-to case study for the next few decades on why a sensible and robust regulatory regime is needed as the market is not able to proactively take care of external costs effectively such as safety and the environment, and that the current climate of deregulation has gone too far.
Re:Regulation and the market (Score:5, Informative)
Hopefully the 737MAX is also an excellent case for why it's necessary to have independent software quality assurance relative to the development team.
Having worked software QA, I've found that developers tend to end up blind to cases where their software fails. I suppose that this isn't surprising given that getting complex software to even work in best-case scenarios is itself no trivial task, but then asking developers to effectively police themselves is absolutely ludicrous.
When I did software QA I was testing something relatively trivial, e-mail communications daemons for a message conversion system, back in the late nineties and early noughties. The particular people writing these fresh SMTP and POP3 implementations not only failed to properly account for garbage input, but they also failed to account for deprecated commands that were no longer in modern RFC. The e-mail client we used in our own offices could be set up to use these deprecated commands, which would cause the daemons to crash hard. The POP3 daemon crashed with TOP, the SMTP daemon crashed with Bin-Hex encoded attachments instead of MIME. Neither developer easily accepted that their software was faulty, it took bosses above them to force them to write to handle garbage gracefully instead of crashing the entire system.
I would hope that developers for real-time systems like aircraft controls are better than this, but based on my own professional experience I certainly wouldn't count on it. Thinking about failure modes when just trying to get the damn thing to work isn't what developers concentrate on. It's what QA engineers concentrate on, and that role is definitely necessary.
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Taken as software alone the system was probably just fine, you would need system level QA and fault tree analysis to see where the problems really are,
Re:Regulation and the market (Score:5, Interesting)
Definitely it is not just software issue, software-adjacent issues don't even cover all the problems.
Such as the manual trim wheel which can't be used when aerodynamic forces counter desired movement.
Which is an issue that equally affects earlier 737 NG with much larger fleet in service.
Which is why all we hear on that is utter silence, because it threatens much larger disruption.
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Though all Boeing needed to do was reduce the size of the sprocket behind the smaller trim wheel, to increase the mechanical advantage.
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Absolutely, physical replacement of the part is very reasonably viable, but there is media silence on this issue because threat of NG fleet grounding is very plausible especially with MAX narrative leading to demands regulators stop flawed platforms from flying. Business as usual might allow for lower priority maintenance directive allowing part replacement on rolling basis once solution is certified, but MAX scandal endangers that approach which so obviously prioritizes industry interests over technical sa
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threat of NG fleet grounding is very plausible
However on the NG you can still use manual electronic trim controls with the autopilot trim controls disabled [seattletimes.com].
They changed that on the MAX so you couldn't turn the autopilot trim controls off separately, you had to turn off all electronic trim controls.
It's been theorized that if this option had been available the pilots of the Ethiopian Airlines flight would have been able to save the aircraft using the electronic trim controls.
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Taken as software alone the system was probably just fine, you would need system level QA and fault tree analysis to see where the problems really are,
Sure. My intention wasn't to say that software QA is the only QA. My point is that QA is a contrarian, confrontational position. People lack the ability to be sufficiently contrarian to themselves and they certainly lack the ability to be self-confrontational.
Whatever the form QA takes, done right it puts the QA tester at-odds with the development team. QA is the food-critic to the meals that the development team cooks up.
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Self-certification is the process by which a manufacturer internally validates that a vehicle meets the applicable regulatory requirements of a specific market. It is not necessary that witnessed testing be conducted by a government authority [...] The vehicle can be registered and sold based on the manufacturerâ(TM)s self-certification declaration
So the US motor industry has been doing what Boeing did with the 737 Max for decades.
It wouldn't surprise me if Boeing brought up the US motor industry standard practice in this area as a defence if this mess goes to court.
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or maybe they decided to go all devops and have the developers (and users) test their own product.. :)
qa in general always seems like such an uphill battle to get it properly in anywhere..
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QA is a lot like security. When it's done right no one notices it except when they have to budget it or cut checks.
As such it's neglected if people in positions to control the money don't understand what it does.
And then a few months or years later, they learn the hard way what not paying for it does.
Re:Regulation and the market (Score:5, Funny)
A software QA tester walked into a bar and ordered 1 beer.
Then he ordered '0' beers.
Then '999999999999999999' beers.
Then '-1' beers.
Then 'zero' beers.
And '\0' beers.
And '%q*12asdfbcc4(' beers.
And '\x22' beers.....
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A software QA tester walked into a bar and ordered 1 beer.
Then he ordered '0' beers.
Then '999999999999999999' beers.
Then '-1' beers.
Then 'zero' beers.
And '\0' beers.
And '%q*12asdfbcc4(' beers.
And '\x22' beers.....
A proper barman would've rejected his third and fourth requests, and cut him off on his sixth for having had enough.
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The bar is deployed.
The first customer walks in and asks "Where is the bathroom?"
The bar burns to the ground in an instant fireball.
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This is why we need to stop neglecting and keep SQA especially internal testers. It's fine to have external testers, but don't get rid of the internal ones!
Quality assurance versus quality control (Score:1)
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In the company I worked for, Quality Assurance was the name for the department that I worked for as an internal software tester, working on software during the development process.
In the company that my wife worked for, Quality Control were employees that worked at the end of the manufacturing line, inspecting individual products or samplings of products after final manufacture before they were shipped to customers. My wife's job as a Quality Engineer was to inspect development results and sometimes manufa
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Or, it could go down as an example of why regulations seem to not do what everyone thinks they are going to do.
One once hand you have people with more faith in government and regulations than reality. Even though we have seen more than enough regulatory failure and human death already.
The solution to this problem is not to "regulate harder".
The solution is to get rid of the regulations and to send CEO's to jail or make it very expensive for the industry to let the aircraft's fail and murder folks as much a
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Or, it could go down as an example of why regulations seem to not do what everyone thinks they are going to do.
One once hand you have people with more faith in government and regulations than reality. Even though we have seen more than enough regulatory failure and human death already.
The solution to this problem is not to "regulate harder".
The solution is to get rid of the regulations and to send CEO's to jail or make it very expensive for the industry to let the aircraft's fail and murder folks as much as they do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Year Deaths Incidents 2018 1,040 113[57] 2017 399 101 2016 629 102 2015 898 123 2014 1,328 122 2013 459 138 2012 800 156 2011 828 154 2010 1,130 162
Just look at those numbers over a hundred incidents a year. The only thing more regulations are going to do is make flying expensive without making anything less dangerous. The world is going a bangup job turning folks like you into Air Industry Murder apologists.
As long as bribery is legal and corporations can effectively buy their own laws by renting congressmen and purchase verdicts by bribing party leaders who then hand out orders to politically appointed judges on how to rule, neither of the approaches you described are going to work. The only certainty here is that CEO's will get of scot free and the rest of us will get to die because of their greed and incompetence.
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The solution is to get rid of the regulations and to send CEO's to jail or make it very expensive for the industry to let the aircraft's fail ...
Pretty sure we can have both -- regulations and hold people accountable -- if we *really* wanted to.
Re:Regulation and the market (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe a better analysis is looking at total fatalities by the US airlines regulated by the FAA:
2019 - 0
2018 - 1 (Southwest engine explosion, passenger hit by debris, plane landed safely)
2017 - 0
2016 - 0
2015 - 0
2014 - 0
2013 - 0
2012 - 0
2011 - 0
2010 - 0
It seems the FAA regulations are doing an absolutely fantastic job at providing an unrivaled safety record in transportation, far, far better than anywhere else and every other transportation method in human history. Moving 500 miles an hour while 6 miles above the ground in the US has caused less fatalities than vending machines in the last decade.
And if you bothered to include the entire list in the Wikipedia link you posted instead of stopping at 2010, you'd see that the number of fatalities and incidents are WAY down.
1970's - average of 313 incidents with 2,451 fatalities per year
1980's - average of 261 incidents with 2,048 fatalities per year
1990's - average of 246 incidents with 1,893 fatalities per year
2000's - average of 189 incidents with 1,235 fatalities per year
2010-2019 - average of 130 incidents with 835 fatalities per year
This is not even factoring in the massive increase in the number of flights and number of passengers over these time periods. There were 310,000,000 passengers worldwide on airlines in 1970. There were 4,378,000,000 in 2018.
Reducing fatalities by more than 60% while increasing the number of passengers by 1400% does not support the "The only thing more regulations are going to do is make flying expensive without making anything less dangerous" theory.
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So more regulation leads to safety issues? That is demonstrably untrue. The history of aviation safety is a textbook example of a heavily regulated industry leading to huge improvements and far fewer crashes as each decade goes by. This very story shows how less government oversight leads to safety problems.
Once again, the "smaller government" crowd is shown to be all about ideology rather than facts, although it is amusing that you think that this will be solved by President Trump. I thought that you wante
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No, we can be absolutely sure. All you need to do is look at how much of that better technology has been mandated by FAA over the years. The airlines tend not to make costly changes to their existing planes unless they are forced to.
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The 737 Max will also be the go to case for bad aeronaugtical engineering. Everyone knows the sad story about who an obsolete airframe was turned into a flaming deathtrap by the lust of money and just plain bad engineering. Everyone involved needs to be hung out to dry to make an example, including Boeing itself, and that still won't bring back those poor unfortunate souls who were mass murdered.
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In offices across from Seattleâ(TM)s Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max.
Really? In Seattle? With a $15/hour minimum wage?
Compensation aside, the 737 MAX problems were not due to software faults. The software performed per specification. It was the flight control engineers that thought they could get away without redundant inputs and management that thought they could get away without adding training on the system that are to blame.
Zombie Lie (Score:2)
Other nations have much higher minimum wages indexed to inflation, and they pay comparable prices for products compared to people living in the United States. This is just an excuse to keep a hundred million people living in poverty.
Re:Boeing was also hiring $9 software engineers (Score:5, Informative)
When I started working, minimum wage was $1.50 an hour and I could go down to the local hamburger stand and get two burgers, two fries and a drink for less than $1.00.
I just got off jury duty, $15.00 a day!, and went across the street to the local hamburger stand, and two burgers, two fries and a drink would cost $17.00!
Yes, $15.00 an hour is what the pay the new hiree who knows nothing but needs a start. The real workers should get $25.00 to $30.00 an hour and the better ones even more.
My weekly paycheck, $129.00, paid the monthly rent for an apartment. They now go for $2,000 a month.
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I'm not denying that $15/hr is shit pay. It's just that it's the law and I'm doubting that Boeing would risk an investigation over $9/hr wages for anyone working on their property.
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Would you trust avionics development to someone making less than a fry cook?
I find it completely irrelevant how much a software developer gets paid as the resulting quality of software produced almost exclusively depends on the development process, standards, and QA sitting behind it. If anything paying more is likely to get you some expert writing complex spaghetti code rather than the copy paste of tried and tested functions that you should be aiming for.
Boeing's problem isn't how much it payed people. It's that it's entire production management system is a bucket of mismanaged s
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For the love of god, can we please start indicting people?
I wouldn't stop at just the people within a company - I'd also start looking at lobbyists and government officials, both present and past, that have had a hand at reducing regulation, that has contributed to those accidents.
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The incompetents that created this mess and are directly responsible for the deaths are "too big to punish". They will go free.
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The crazy thing is one of the reasons CEO's say they are paid so high is because its such a risky job. I mean if the buck doesn't stop with them - where does it?
This is by design (Score:5, Insightful)
Those job killing bureaucrats who tell you what to do are the ones keeping your water & air clean, your cars safe, your loans free of the worst of the fine print and yes, your planes in the air.
This is the sort of thing that is going to happen when you put people in charge of government who campaign on "Government isn't the solution, it's the problem".
TL;DR; We put people who don't believe in the process in charge of the process. What the *bleep* were we expecting?
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who campaign on "Government isn't the solution, it's the problem".
The people who campaigned on that based the slogan on very concrete facts, basically the problems during the McCarthy era. Reagan was at the center of that. Things are subtle and tricky.
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Subtle and tricky is putting forth a statement like that without mentioning what those "facts" actually are.
Since you seem to be ignorant of history, I'll spell it out more clearly:
In this case, we have Boeing who should have had more government power watching over them, preventing them from releasing an airplane that killed people.
In the case of the McCarthy era, the government should have had less power, preventing "a modern tragedy" (those words come from his museum in his hometown where he grew up).
Recognizing this does not mean I agree with everything Reagan did, and you're a moron for even implying it
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Here's a shocker for you: sometimes I also agree with Trump.
I do too! He is right that some bottles of Californian wine look better than the ones of French wine! (Apparently, that was the basis for him saying that he preferred American wines to French ones....)
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The thing is that he claims to not drink alcohol. So apparently he got asked how he could assess wine quality and that was his answer. Could be an instant urban legend though, I have not verified this.
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With all due respect (Score:3)
If this is a troll bravo sir, bravo. If it's not then it's a cry for help.
Let me say this: You _will_ have government. You had it under Reagan and it grew faster than under any Democ
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what the *bleep* are you talking about? Reagan was at the center of McCarthyism because he was selling out fellow actors
Yeah. He thought he was helping the government, saw first hand the damage it caused, and decided that "the most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Then he switched political parties.
That's the narrative. Whether it's true or not, doesn't matter. The point (as I said elsewhere) is subtle.
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The point (as I said elsewhere) is subtle.
In contrast to your stupidity, which is not subtle at all.
Re: With all due respect (Score:2)
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Yeah. He thought he was helping the government, saw first hand the damage it caused, and decided that "the most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Then he switched political parties.
That would be a weird reaction to seeing the Red Menace pushed by Joe McCarthy (R-WI) under the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower (R) - "I'd better become a republican because... .ummm.... er.... government run by... republicans is.... bad?"
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German cars are far better than american cars, and have far more union involvement than any american company.
> Why are high interest loans in left wing bla bla bla
Lies
> plane companies bla bla
Lies
Regulation isn't left wing.
> Why cities bla bla bla
Because they are cities? Right wing cities are just as dirty as left wing cities.
Well, itâ(TM)s a sign of the times (Score:2)
Abrogation of any and all responsibilities.
Outrage to anything the response.
Living in an echo chamber.
Let's have some perspective: FDA (Score:5, Insightful)
By 2018, the F.A.A. was letting the company certify 96 percent of its own work, according to an agency official.
The FDA does not rigorously review every decision and do its own independent detailed analysis of all test data for medical devices and drugs, either. If a risk has properly documented reasons for very low risk of patient harm, then it is just spot checked. It is sure hard to second guess such a decision by looking a spreadsheet, without intimately understanding the technical and scientific details.
Regulators must rely on a certain level of competence and integrity on the part of the industry they regulate, especially in complex areas. Clearly the holes the FAA allowed were too big, but the ultimate problem is Boeing made several absurdly risky decisions, at multiple levels.
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And yet, approving new drugs is stupidly expensive and takes years and years of red tape. What sort of counter-example is that?
I'm no expert on auditing and how to build effective oversight machinery, but I'm quite sure that between FAA and boeing, something went horribly wrong, resulting in quite a few deaths. I don't know what it is but I want it found and fixed. I'm sure I'm not the only one with this rather obivous outlook. But apparently boeing didn't share this view, seeing their decisions. I'm remind
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And yet, approving new drugs is stupidly expensive and takes years and years of red tape. What sort of counter-example is that?
I'm no expert on auditing and how to build effective oversight machinery, but I'm quite sure that between FAA and boeing, something went horribly wrong, resulting in quite a few deaths. I don't know what it is but I want it found and fixed. I'm sure I'm not the only one with this rather obivous outlook. But apparently boeing didn't share this view, seeing their decisions. I'm reminded of Feynman's appendix to the challenger disaster report. This smells similarly rotten.
Something went horribly wrong? Bribery was made legal by the 'Citizens United' ruling, the US Congress is full of nitwits who are too stupid or lazy to write their own legislation and rely on getting in the form of e-mail attachments from industry lobbyists, the ranks of the FAA are stacked full of (supposedly) former corporate functionaries and Boeing was doing practically 100% of the certifications on its own products .What could possibly go wrong?
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And yet, approving new drugs is stupidly expensive and takes years and years of red tape. What sort of counter-example is that?
Getting a new drug to market, assuming the trial data pans out, "only" take a couple billion dollars. It is a measurably simpler problem than building a long haul passenger airliner.
I agree with the analogy with the Challenger. I think there are many, many bad decisions here, well beyond technical details of the software. There are red flags all over the place that were ignored.
Is this news (Score:4, Insightful)
Didn't we know this months ago?
If c6gunner has finally admitted it wasn't pilot error, *that* would be news.
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He'll never do that. That would be like Rei admitting to shilling for Tesla.
Or you not hiding behind the AC checkbox.
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That cretin is not able to see reality. He squarely lives in a fantasy of his own making. Basically, a fanatic.
The invisible hand of capitalism... (Score:1)
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Controls vulnerable to uncontained engine failures (Score:5, Interesting)
"F.A.A. managers conceded that the Max "does not meet" agency guidelines "for protecting flight controls," according to an agency document. But in another document, they added that they had to consider whether any requested changes would interfere with Boeing's timeline."
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And why have independent oversight? (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple: The bean-counters that run corporations these days have no clue about what is important and have zero honor. All they have greed and an absolute certainty of their own importance. No humility, critical reflection, etc. and any good engineer _knows_ what that leads to. Hence removing independence from the oversight is assured to result in the type of disaster we have seen. And if they had managed to compromise the FAA even more, these deathtraps would still be flying...
Of course, nobody will go to prison for what, at the very least, was criminally negligent homicide on mass-scale. So the bean-counters that are responsible for the kills will not really even be impacted by their evil deed and will just continue as they were doing before. Power corrupts. Power without accountability corrupts absolutely.
So, what is going to be done about it? (Score:1)
When do the bailout talks begin?
Can they apply this *nose dive* technology to their cruise missiles?
Look, we gotta speed up the line, ok? [allgov.com]
Old news (Score:2)
We knew about this for months now: https://www.politico.com/story... [politico.com]
Boeing 737 Max demanded by Southwest Airlines (Score:1)
Southwest Airlines threatened to buy Airbus if Boeing did not come out with a new, more fuel efficient 737. I wouldn't be surprised to Boeing decided to be cheap in designing the 737 Max.
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I wouldn't be surprised to Boeing decided to be cheap in designing the 737 Max.
Both cheap and fast, to prevent Airbus getting the sale.
Self-policing (Score:1)
Self-policing at its worse; self-policing never works because self-interest overrides any control, containment, or policing. But several hundred people had to die in the self-policing, economize the process for greater profits.
Too big to fail (Score:3)
I see (Score:2)
So they have 'the best people' as well.
Oversight and Delegation (Score:1)
The fundamental problem with aviation regulation is that it is impractical to keep an army of engineers employed by any regulator to fully review and audit every detail of a modern aircraft programme. All the major airworthiness authorities delegate most of the work to the manufacturers. In principle, the FAA and the European EASA employ similar systems except that the FAA delegate authority whereas EASA delegate responsibility.
The sets of regulations
Self Certification is Garbage (Score:2)
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No.
We do not have a definitive answer yet, but it appears the Ethiopian pilots disabled the system in a reasonably timely manner, but it was too difficult to manually force the trim back into a safe position before the plane flew into the ground.