Front Burner - Is the Boeing 737 Max 8 safe?

Episode Date: March 13, 2019

A growing list of countries have grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8 following a crash that killed 157 people, including 18 Canadians. Not even six months ago the same type of airplane plunged into the Java sea near Indonesia. Today on Front Burner, an aviation expert explains the mounting concerns over this Boeing model and CBC's Susan Ormiston reports from the Ethiopian crash site.

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about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. For years, men were disappearing from Toronto's gay village. I feel terrorized. I'm Justin Ling, this season on Uncover. If we see this is happening, how can you not see this? They suspected a serial killer. And they were right.

Police arrested 66-year-old Bruce MacArthur. But this wasn't the first time the village was targeted. You don't start killing at 66. You'd start killing when you're in your late teens or early 20s. Uncover The Village. Coming April 2nd. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. A growing list of countries have now grounded the Boeing 737 MAX 8,

following a crash that killed 157 people, 18 of them Canadians. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency has suspended all operations of the Boeing 737 MAX. It joins the UK. India has announced it too is grounding the jets. Canada has not banned any of those aircraft. Not even six months ago, the same make of airplane plunged into the Java Sea near Indonesia. It's one of the worst air disasters in Indonesia's history.

This killed 189 people. Today, the mounting concerns over this model of plane and the impact of the groundings. But first, my colleague Susan Ormiston is in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and she's just visited the crash site. This is FrontBurner. Hi, Susan. Hi. Where have we reached you right now? Well, I'm in a hotel back in Addis Ababa after spending most of the day really at the crash site,

which is an hour and a half, almost two hours of a very difficult road outside of Addis Ababa. There's good pavement for part of the way, and then you turn off the highway and you go into a different world. It's rural Ethiopia, livestock on the roads, bumps, donkeys carrying water. That's where this plane plunged into the earth on Sunday. We are following breaking news out of Ethiopia, where a plane went down just outside the capital, killing everyone on board. The airline told state media there were people of more than 30 nationalities among the dead. Family members rushed to airports in both Ethiopia and Kenya, desperate to find out what had happened.

I imagine that it's one thing to think about the scope of the loss of life here, but quite another to be standing beside it or amongst it. Can you tell me what it was like on the ground? Yeah, I mean, there's a multitude of emotions. Just imagine this wide expanse of an African plain rounded by beautiful hills and forests, actually, and then in the middle, a sort of black, scorched scar. The earth has been disturbed. The plain, I understand, came in nose first, dove with such force into the ground that it buried part of the plane. So the fuselage was actually buried into the ground.

So diggers have been trying for days to excavate this crater, the remnants of the plane, which they've now piled in big hulking hills of mangled metal on the sides of the crash. And today, a really busy site because 35 countries involved in this crash, their citizens, perished. You can imagine multiple countries are sending their own teams of investigators and researchers, forensic researchers, to look at this site and try to come up with what and how it happened. Who's there right now? So today we saw the investigation really kick off with the arrival of teams from America, the Boeing company who shrugged off inquiries from all media,

the NTSB in the United States, the FFA in the United States, Ethiopian Airlines has their team, Israel has sent a team of investigators to try to identify some remains. So there's a multitude of countries and we expect more will come. Interpol was out there today. They are really involved with identifying the remains at the site. And that's a critical phase of this investigation, not just for families to really have their loved ones buried, but also to accurately and positively confirm who was involved in this crash. It's a very difficult thing. We also learned that the RCMP may be assembling a team for that purpose. Besides what you've heard about the RCMP, did you get a sense of any Canadian presence on the ground, official or otherwise? 18 Canadians have died in this crash.

Yes, we have not met any families here in Ethiopia. We do know that the Canadian embassy is working night and day, really, consular services. But it's a long way from Canada to get here. This only happened Sunday afternoon, Canada time, people becoming aware of the crash. So we expect that other families will be likely coming here to the site where their loved ones died. But so far, we haven't seen a lot of people. There was one Israeli brother there today whose eldest brother died in the crash. It's never over until you understand all the situation.

And we will work very hard to bring those important family members to the grave in Israel. There was a small group of Chinese businessmen in black suits who stood at one side, lined up and bowed in unison. One of their colleagues, a 33-year-old, died in the crash. He stopped here and stayed here forever. So difficult. Yeah, very difficult. They're not only working in the same company, we're very close friends. Very close friends. Even he's same company. We are very close friends. Very close friends.

Even he's young, but we're very close. But really not a lot of, certainly no throng of family members coming out to this site. It's not easy to get to. And it's now much of the circumference of the site is blocked off by police tape as the investigators walk in and try to do their work. Can you tell me a little bit more about the brother that you met from Israel? Yeah, he was stoic in his approach. He came with friends and this special team from Israel to identify his brother's remains, quite frankly. He told us that. He said

for Israelis, you know, in their culture, it's very important to have something to bury. And they are sending DNA from his brother in Tel Aviv to Ethiopia in order to match it up with any remains that have been returned or found. In this case we need to find some identified until the DNA that we can bury some reminders that we can make the ceremony. Otherwise if we will not find the person will stay missing for the rest of the life. Ethiopian Airlines has collected bodies and bags of remain, for lack of a better description, at a central site here in Addis Ababa and families, they're counseling families on how to get news

about identification, which is a critical phase. You mentioned that the site is quite busy because there are so many groups involved in the investigation. I understand it's also becoming a bit of a shrine as well. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Well, one evidence of a shrine-like atmosphere is this Chinese group that I spoke of. They brought a plate of food for their colleague. It had fruit and importantly Ethiopian bread because this 33 year old was involved in setting up schools and skill development through his company for young Ethiopians and he loved coming here and he loved the bread. Every time when he come to Ethiopia he like in Jela. He also like Ethiopia culture. His colleague told us that they're setting out the food and the bread

because in Chinese culture they believe he is in heaven and he needs food and clothing while he's there, and that's what they told us. The other part about it is that, as I mentioned, this is a very rural spot, and there are hundreds, many hundreds of villagers who walk or ride donkeys, most of them walking through the fields, to come to the site daily to sort of line up silently, mostly, solemnly, sitting on their haunches, some of them, and just observing this hive of activity with

diggers and investigators coming through and journalists coming to the scene. I imagine, you know, trying to comprehend how this plane dropped out of the sky in their backyard, really, because aside from this place, you can look for kilometers around here and see nothing but quite a resting landscape. Susan, thank you so much for taking us through what you saw today, and we'll keep in touch with you this week. All right.

Thanks very much. Thank you. So as Susan mentioned in our conversation, the investigation into the Ethiopian Airlines crash is very much ongoing. The cause of this crash has not been determined yet. But there is suspicion that this crash and the crash months ago near Indonesia could trace back to the plane's automation system. Many countries are not waiting for more information. They have suspended Boeing 737 MAX 8 flights. Some countries aren't taking any chances. China, Indonesia, Ethiopia. The European Union's Air Safety Agency announced it's grounding 737-8 and 737-9 aircraft models. That applies to all EU airspace. But Canada so far is not one of the countries that grounded these planes.

Mary Schiavo thinks this is the wrong decision. Hi, Mary. Hi there. Good to be with you. Thanks so much for joining us today. So you're a pilot and the former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation. And I'm really interested to get your take today. Europe's aviation safety regulator has suspended the 737 MAX 8 across the EU. Australia, China, Norway, Ethiopia have done the same. The list, it goes on. Is this unprecedented?

Have we ever seen anything like this before? No, not anything quite like this. Two brand-new planes falling from the sky within six months, and the nation of origin of the aircraft has not issued the order, but the rest of the world has. So it's very, very unusual, pretty much unprecedented. And there are orders out that Boeing has to fix the plane by April, and if they don't, the United States FAA warns that the planes could lose control, lose altitude, and impact the ground. Their words.

Euphemism for a crash. So it's just common sense what other nations are doing. And by the way, airlines could do that on their own. They're in charge of their own safety, too. They could ground them. In a statement, Air Canada says it currently has 24 in its fleet, adding these aircraft have performed excellently from a safety, reliability, and customer satisfaction perspective.

WestJet says it has 13 of the MAX 8 aircraft. In a statement, the company said, We're monitoring the situation closely. I do want to get to this order that's been made for Boeing to fix these issues by April. But first, when you say that this has never happened before, we've never seen countries ground airlines without an order from the country of origin, you mean the United States because Boeing is an American company? Are we talking about the FAA here, not issuing this warning?

The FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, would issue airworthiness directives or would rescind the airworthiness certificate. The FAA is stating that the 737 MAX 8 continues to have airworthiness, so they are not issuing that blanket grounding. Got it. I do want to talk to you about why the FAA may be reticent to make this decision. But first, can we just wrap our heads around what the problem is here? There seems to be a system that's suspected to be at the heart of these two crashes. And what do people think may have transpired here? So for this model, the MAX 8 and 9, they put new engines on it that were more

powerful and more efficient. But when they put the new engines on the plane, the plane had a problem. The nose pitched up in the air. And if it pitches up too far, the plane can stall. Boeing put in its computers a program that would push the nose of the plane down when the plane detected irregularities that was programmed to counteract, but it didn't tell the pilots. So when Lion Air happened... A passenger plane carrying 189 people went down minutes after taking off from Jakarta. They said, oh, we put this in to counteract the problem of the nose pitching up. All you have to do is turn the system off.

After the Indonesia crash, the airline sent out some sort of notice to pilots saying that they have to turn the system off? Okay. So after Indonesia, there was an airway directive that went out, and there was a new manual put in the flight manual for the planes that said, here's how you detect if you have this problem going on with your plane, a runaway tram. Here's how you troubleshoot it. And here's this new page in your manual. And this page then tells you to go to another page in the manual.

And that tells you how to shut the system off. And in your experience, is this sufficient? No, of course not. You can't troubleshoot an aircraft full of passengers on takeoff. It's the most dangerous part of flight. And you can't tell a pilot, oh, if this goes wrong, you fix it. No, Boeing, it was your job to fix it. So they were relying on the pilots to fix a problem in the plane and a problem that occurs on the most dangerous time of flight, takeoff. So why didn't they fix it or why didn't somebody order them to fix this problem?

Well, because Boeing said that was sufficient and Boeing said it many, many times that it was sufficient. And if you train the pilots, the pilots must have an hour of training and supposed to look at this page in the manual. And the FAA issued the air waste directive and said that was sufficient. Why? Because people trusted Boeing. Boeing really is, I mean, you know, as far as this plane is concerned, they're the world's authority on it. And if they said this would solve the problem, people trusted them. And so what's happened now after this crash in Ethiopia? Well, what's very interesting is immediately after this crash, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a new order, and they said it had been in the works for

some time, and this new order, they said, doesn't have anything to do with the Ethiopia crash, but instead this new order orders Boeing to go back and fix the computers, that this page in the manual is not enough, and they cannot allow this to go on. And they have to do it by April. But, by the way, the FAA said, no, this doesn't have anything to do with Africa, because we don't know what happened to that plane. But this fix has to be put in by April. So that was the third step. And so officially, they're saying the Ethiopia crash is an unknown. The U.S. Federal Aviation Authority emphasized its review of MAX 8s shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. So if I were to summarize what happened here, there was this issue with this plane where the system would cause the nose to point upwards or to think that the nose was pointing upwards, even though that wasn't the case.

And then the systems would then force the nose downwards significantly. and Boeing stepped in after the Indonesia crash with a page in their manual and a directive telling pilots how to fix this problem. But they didn't actually fix the problem at the heart of it. And then after this crash in Ethiopia, even though everybody says they don't know what caused this crash yet, the FAA has issued a directive ordering Boeing to fix this problem by April. Yes. That's in a nutshell what has happened. The decision by these individual countries to ground this plane, it started with China and Ethiopia and Indonesia.

But, you know, there was this one comment made by a civil aviation administration official in China that really got my attention. The official said that they had been asking Boeing and the FAA about this piloting software for months after the Indonesia crash, and they had not gotten satisfactory answers. Why is it that you think China is at least saying that they weren't being able to get satisfactory answers from the FAA? Probably for the same reason that the FAA didn't put out this warning telling, and this directive telling Boeing to fix the plane until after the second plane had crashed. It shouldn't take six months to get a corrective action for an aircraft for a problem that could bring the plane down and kill hundreds of people. So the United States has obviously made the decision to not ground these planes. The FAA

has not issued that directive, but neither has Canada, although our transportation minister today said that he was reconsidering his decision. I am confident that we are following up on this very very carefully and very with with all of the priority that is necessary to ensure that we discover what the cause of the accident was and then I will not hesitate to take any action necessary. He then went on to say... I would, without any hesitation, board an aircraft of that type at this particular moment in time. Do you think that it's possible that Canada is taking its cues from the United States? It's possible because the United States and Canada have always worked closely together, as our aviation authorities have and our investigation bodies. And, you know,

usually that's a really good thing. You know, it's great that the United States and Canada can work together. And so quite, you know, quite frequently we do do things together. And usually that makes a lot of sense. Here, a lot of this makes no sense, and I think everybody's still trying to sort it out. What is the impact for Boeing if these planes were all grounded all over the world? Well, it's a very large financial impact. When you sell new planes to operators, to airlines, there's a certain period of time. It's kind of like your warranty for your car in a certain period time in which the uh... manufacturer the assembler boeing is responsible for things that go wrong with the plane

and uh... for example on a on airway this director that kinda like a recall on your car they're responsible for the expense if they can do it piecemeal over a period of months rather than all want it much less expensive much less expensive. But, you know, people need, you know, Boeing and others, but people need to get past that. People have forgotten that the 787 Dreamliner was grounded after the battery fire. The brakes are on the future of air travel this morning. The FAA has temporarily grounded the Boeing 787 Dreamliner

to address the potential fire risk. And what happened? They fixed the problem and then it was fine. So I don't see that putting these planes on the ground until everyone knows what caused them to crash and then we can know that they are safe is a bad thing. It's a good thing. That's why we have black boxes. Is it also possible that Boeing is correct here? Boeing has issued a few different statements since this crash in Ethiopia. They seem very confident that their planes are safe, that the 737 MAX 8 is safe. Boeing, in a statement, said it had full confidence in the

plane, saw no reason to ground it, and had not been told by the Federal Aviation Administration to take any further steps. How can you possibly, how can anyone possibly say that when two brand new aircraft have drilled holes in the earth? That's completely, it's nonsensical. Mary, thank you so much for your time. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you. So, as I mentioned in my conversation with Mary,

Canada's Transportation Minister, Mark Garneau, says he's looking at old possibilities regarding grounding the planes. Here's some more of what he had to say to reporters on Tuesday. It's important for us not to jump to conclusions, Seder reporters on Tuesday. It's important for us not to jump to conclusions but to evaluate in a very objective and logical way what happened. So we are in the data gathering mode, we're looking for information, we're talking to all the experts. And in a statement late Tuesday, the acting head of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, said, Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft.

So that's it for today. I'm Jamie Poisson, and thanks for listening to FrontBurner. And thanks for listening to Front Burner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.