[SaveFerris]

I don’t think they had a chance with that elevator trim control stripped.

Seems like it stabilized a little here and there but any disturbance could have upset it.

I’d have to look again, it seemed jammed at first, as I recall.

Yeah if they had left it alone at that point maybe they could have tried other ways to trim.

Pretty dang scary.

[rx]

The pilots' repeated exercising of the elevator trim control exacerbated the problem by creating unusual wear on the nitrited jackscrew, ultimately dooming the flight.

In their earlier double-check of Mechanic John Liotine's work, the supervisors didn't calibrate the test equipment properly, thus didn't believe the wear was outside normal parameters.

If they had listened to John Liotine, those 88 people wouldn't have died that day. Yay, John!

But the fact is that it was the ozone found in "chemtrails" that that craft had spent an inordinate amount of time following in and traversing that did in the lubricant, and then in turn, the treated jackscrew surface. The supervisors in part were probably somewhat reasonably extrapolating from the far less severe wear patterns they'd seen on jackscrews in several other of the Company's MD-83 aircraft.

Fortunately, the real problem was quickly fixed with a different lubricant far less susceptible to ozone.