Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and honourable members of this standing committee.
Firstly, I want to thank you for this invitation to seek information and to perhaps assist in answering your questions relating to aircraft certification in Canada, from one of the three airlines with the 737 Max in its fleet.
My name is John Hudson. I'm the acting director of flight operations at Sunwing. In addition to being a Transport Canada check pilot at Sunwing, I've been there in both standards and technical roles since 2012. I'm proud to be a military veteran. I have been flying Boeing aircraft for just under 30 years. I'm currently flying the 737 NG, as I said, as a Transport Canada check pilot, an instructor pilot and a captain.
My employer, Sunwing Travel Group, is the largest tour operator in North America. The airline doubles in size to 40 aircraft in the winter season to service Canadian holiday travellers and shrinks to half that size in the summer while we send pilots and aircraft to serve our European partners, keeping a smaller fleet within Canada in the summer.
Sunwing is devastated by the loss of life from the two Max accidents, Lion Air 610 on 29 October, 2018, and Ethiopian Airlines 302 on 10 March, 2019. We wish to express once again our deepest sympathies, as my colleagues have expressed here today. This is an unprecedented event in my aviation career and will never be forgotten by all of us in the Sunwing family. I want to make that point.
We took deliveries of our four Max aircraft from 25 May, 2018, to 11 March, 2019, and we had more than 7,000 hours of flight time on the Max aircraft when we stopped flying them. I conducted several of the customer demonstration flights in Seattle with Boeing pilots on the first of our Max delivery aircraft. I currently have about 80 hours flying on the Max 8 itself and have been conducting several post-grounding maintenance flights on our Max fleets. Like all of our pilots and like those at WestJet, we are dual-qualified on the Max and the 737 NG.
In addition to my role at Sunwing, I am humbled and privilege to represent the three Canadian Max-operating airlines for the IATA—the International Air Transport Association—Max task force since May 23 last year. That task force consists of international airline representatives from 11 airlines representing North America, South America, Europe, Singapore and China. It's a truly international group.
I have been asked today to bring my airline's perspective on the aircraft certification process. This perspective is strictly from an operational viewpoint and does not include the perspective from our engineering and maintenance groups. Nor will it delve into the unprecedented economic strain that has been inflicted on each of our airlines.
From the start of the entry-into-service project, Sunwing's interaction was with Boeing directly through a dedicated entry representative. The level of collaboration with Boeing directly was very high, but our initiative to liaise with the American airlines that were taking early Max deliveries and with our European partner, the TUI Group, greatly enhanced our training. Once again it was done in collaboration. Transport Canada national operations was also with us every step of the way as we worked through our entry into service.
For the entry into service pilot training, the Max was a relative easy conversion. Based on what we knew at the time and based on 12 years of operating the 737-800, the NG, there was little difference in procedures and in the pilot-level systems knowledge required. We were aware of the more complex differences confronting engineering in the systems; for instance, new engines, new digital environmental control systems and fly-by-wire spoilers. From a pilot's perspective, though, flying the Max in normal operations was truly like flying the NG.
Following the Lion Air accident and resulting airworthiness directive that Minister Garneau referred to earlier and that my colleagues referred to, we established unprecedented collaboration under the leadership of Transport Canada national operations and the three Canadian airlines operating the Max. This collaboration was a result of the AD that pointed to MCAS activation during an erroneous angle-of-attack event.
When those of us in the standards and fleet management groups looked at the AD, we saw that it revised a document called the “Aircraft Flight Manual”, which is essentially a certification manual and is not directly used by the flight crews. It did not address our own pilot manual—the “Flight Crew Operations Manual”—directly. It left the airlines open to possible different interpretations among ourselves for our respective operations.
That was the point of the collaboration. In our collaboration, we felt it was extremely important that we as a group get the runaway stabilizer procedure correct when we changed it and aligned, and that there be no difference among the three airlines in the way this non-normal event was to be conducted, if necessary. What this unprecedented Canadian collaboration demonstrated was the absolute commitment to safety that the airlines and our regulator in Canada possess.
Early on November 8, 2018, Transport Canada approved our made-in-Canada solution, and we were operating the Max that day with the new checklist. We did and still do firmly believe that these actions significantly mitigated any residual risk surrounding MCAS and runaway stabilizer events on the Max.
Since the Max airspace closure, we have continued and expanded upon this collaboration. However, there have been significant challenges in obtaining timelines and even agreeing on development of the road map for return to service. These mainly surround conflicting information occasionally between the airlines and Boeing—we deal directly with Boeing on a weekly basis—and sometimes between the airlines and Transport Canada and among the Max-operating airlines themselves. We have weekly technical calls with Boeing and periodic meetings with Transport Canada, sometimes with small conflicts in information concerning on which we have to collaborate, regroup and make sure that we're aligned. I don't have a solution to this issue, but occasionally it makes it difficult for the airlines to react.
Last fall and last week, Transport Canada's national aircraft certification, national operations, and standards and the airlines held a Webex meeting at which Transport Canada national aircraft certification explained in very appropriate detail their past and current issues, in addition to several possible Canadian-only changes to both procedures and training when the return-to-service airworthiness directive is published.
We now know approximately what to expect when return to service comes, depending upon the outcome of a couple of meetings. The joint operational evaluation board report and a couple of other events have to happen.
Those of us who operate the NG will also have to react to several changes for that fleet as well, as an outcome. This is now more than a Max issue; rather, it's a 737 issue in some respects. WestJet and Sunwing will have to overcome that to make sure we're all aligned.
In summary, while Sunwing cannot comment significantly on the initial certification process of the Max, I hope I have given you a perspective on the absolute common thrust of “safety first” that all of Transport Canada and the three Max airlines represented here share, and on the way this thrust has been demonstrated in a collaborative and coordinated manner thus far during our return-to-service effort.
I now look forward to answering your questions.
Thank you.