I thought these systems were all fly-by-wire now?
Edit: Don't downvote for asking an honest question, guys. Thanks to the people who actually answered.
Boeing’s recommendation for dealing with a runaway MCAS scenario, in fact, was to cut power to the stabilizer trim motors at just the right moment in a short window of opportunity between cycles of it running, and then have the pilot manually crank the trim by hand turning a wheel that pulls a cable.
With excessive speed, or too much counter-force being put on the stabilizer by pulling back on the stick (because the pilots didn’t cut the electricity fast enough inside the cycle window, leading to the stabilizers forcing the nose down and the pilots needing to counter that to keep above the ground), the wheel can require an enormous, potentially insurmountable amount of force to operate.
Should MAX-8 training include a physical fitness component?
1: https://www.quora.com/Does-the-737-MAX-family-use-fly-by-wir...
You're not :-) The 737 still has direct mechanical linkages to the control surfaces. Changing that would require completely redesigning the aircraft.
Not training the pilots properly was a feature (cheaper for the airlines), and Boeing deliberately wanted to avoid saying they would actually need the training because that was their whole selling point and the reason for all these weird decisions.
Boeing's modern planes (not the legacy 737) have fly by wire where there is still a mechanical connection between the yokes. Thus you have the nice shared feel, but you have the benefits of fly-by-wire.
There have been accidents where fly-by-wire has been part of the problem but there have also been failures of the old mechanical linkage systems. Airliners have had active systems to cancel out unstable modes for a long time (e.g. to suppress "Dutch Roll" on the old 727)
The A320 has particularly been plagued by extreme "human error" situations where people crashed the plane after seemingly trying to crash it. For instance the first passenger flight involved a stunt that resulted in a crash. later on New Zealand regulators who were investigating fly-by-wire glitches tried to provoke the fly-by-wire system into failing when they were approaching a runway and they wound up dead.
The 373 max was a comparative rush job. When Airbus released the A320neo (the A320 first flew in the late 1980s so already was fly-by-wire), Boeing needed to get a comparable plane out ASAP or else cede several thousands of plane sales to Airbus. There wasn't the time to design a whole new plane, so they pushed the design of the 1960s era 373 as far as they could go. The details of the "risky" changes to accommodate the larger engines (that significantly changed the planes aerodynamic profile) and attempts to compensate for that are already documented elsewhere, but adding fly-by-wire would have only made things more complicated.
Market forces drove Boeing to rush out a more fuel efficient 737. Even absent regulatory incentives, market forces drive them to want to deliver a 737-dimensioned plane, because a huge selling point for the NG and MAX is that they're still compatible with decades' old infrastructure at rarely-upgraded regional airports.
Bolting large enough engines to deliver the market-desired fuel efficiency on the market-desired airframe dimensions of the MAX necessarily required mounting them so far forward that the entire airframe is fundamentally prone to pulling into a stall, and correcting that is why MCAS exists.
Certification costs are far from the only reason Boeing has never sat down and designed a successor for 737, even though they've done so for numerous other planes -- half the problem with the 737 is that its engineering achilles heel (the incredibly low ground clearance) is simultaneously a key feature to a large portion of the customer base. Correcting it means all of those customers finally upgrading their ground infrastructure, which leads to Airbus suddenly being a viable competitor for those routes.
Rushing out the MAX let them shore up their advantage in that market — get the fuel savings AND save on the upgrades you won’t need.