Thank you for that. Putting hundreds of aircraft into service before the simulators were available to airline pilots looks rather bad in hindsight.
I would hope that Boeing internally had simulators for the MAX while they were testing it - along with a borrowed supply of pilots who were competent but had no inside information. Even if they didn't, a pencil and paper exercise might have been useful:
1. AOA sensor fails at takeoff (A), the pilots receive an unreliable airspeed warning and the stick shaker activates. The pilots now mistrust their sensors and want to keep their speed up and the nose down.
2. At about 1000 feet above ground the pilots level the aircraft, raise the flaps and start the unreliable airspeed checklist. MCAS starts trimming intermittently.
3. The pilot flying is having to pull further back on the stick and trim correctively while the crew work through their checklist. At this point the crew need to avoid any over-focus, task saturation or over-stimulus from the many warnings and indicators and ask themselves why the aircraft is trimming the way it is. They have a fairly narrow window of time in which to do this and then disable the trimming with the plane in a well trimmed state.
(A) That this happened twice in relatively quick succession might be due to a common problem. Even if such a problem is found and fixed the AOA vanes and pitot tubes are delicate sensors sticking out of the nose of the aircraft; the system should be robust to failures in these sensors.