An Ethiopian Airlines spokesman said that they were aware of the MCAS override protocol and their pilots had all completed the required training to handle such an event.
I will not accept that these two accidents were a coincidence, based on the similar circumstances of them. My gut feeling is that the system is engaging and for some reason, NOT disengaging when the pilots attempt to override it. When a plane has just taken off, there isn't a whole lot of time or altitude to fix a nosedive. You have seconds, a minute at best, when a plane is going over 400mph and has barely cleared 10000 feet.
The pilots communicated that they were having "flight control problems," meaning the plane was NOT responding to pilot inputs. They asked for and received clearance to return to the airport, but could not maintain control of the plane.
The Lion Air crash has been blamed, preliminarily, on a "faulty airspeed indicator."
Something is wrong with this plane model and it needs a fix or they need to scrap it altogether. The fact that Boeing ADMITTED the Max 8's have faulty sensors that may produce erroneous data, which can trigger an automated system to engage in an unnecessary and catastrophic maneuver, seems criminal. They should have issued a fix for the faulty sensors, not created some workaround.