Fight for Survival on Doomed Jet Came Down to Two Cockpit Wheels
By Alan Levin
June 20, 2019, 12:01 AM EDT
For two and a half minutes as Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 roared above Addis Ababa, the jet’s survival depended on the pilots turning a pair of wheels in the cockpit.
Black with white stripes, each disk was the size of a dinner plate and manually adjusted the nose of the Boeing Co. 737 Max up or down. The motor that normally adjusted this angle was shut off because a safety system had gone haywire and it was trying to drive down the jet’s nose.
Cranking the wheels, mounted near the pilots’ thighs, was the key to averting disaster.
“It is not working,” copilot Ahmed Nur Mohammod Nur said, according to cockpit recordings paraphrased in a preliminary report on the March 10 crash.
https://www.bloomberg.com/
Note: When I was a mechanic on the flight line and when we had to check the sensors, we had to jack the plane up and put lugs in the landing gear sensors to make the plane think it was in flight, we then went into the maintenance manual procedure to get those control columns to shake and to check the stall warning sensor with a Rosecrans mounted on the side of the airplane were the angle of attack sensors are located, you used the pickle switches on the column and the wheel, they are talking about in this article. According to this article they had this situation on a previous flight
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I've flown a few complex aircraft w/ AP, but never tried to move the trim wheels while AP was engaged. 
