[cymbeline]

“They didn’t know that the system was there.”

Are you saying there’s a switch to disable it, but the pilots, who must have seen the switch on the console, didn’t know what it was for. Could the switch have been lacking an identification label?

My “something strange” indicator is still flashing brightly.

[Political Junkie Too]

I'm not a pilot, but I'm not sure that everything has a physical switch. It might be computer settings on a screen. It might be something where they have to go to a menu, then a sub-menu, then get the option to disable.

Documentation about the computer-assisted trim settings to stabilize the upward pitching was lacking because the pilots weren't told about the automated leveling features to compensate for the forward placement of the engines.

The computer was trying to push the nose down and the pilots were trying to lift the nose back up during take-off. If this happened at 35,000 feet, they'd have time to look for the system configuration settings. Because it happened at 1,000 feet, they didn't have the time.

Ideally, they would have disabled it completely before taking off and re-engaged it at altitude, if they had known about it in advance.

-PJ