When the tragic accident of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 occurred, we immediately tried to understand what had happened there. I would caution people not to use hindsight here because at the time, on March 10, when this occurred, everybody was trying to understand what happened. Could it have been a mechanical or electrical problem? Could it have been a pilot error? Could it have been a terrorist act? Nobody knew what had happened on this particular occasion. Because we knew there were Canadians on-board and we knew that there were Max 8s that flew in Canada, we were trying to understand what had happened. We were scrambling for information and were speaking to our international partners. We were getting the information, some of it anecdotal, from ground observers. We were trying to find out what had happened in terms of the communications from the control tower and air traffic control. We were trying to understand what had happened with this particular accident because we had no clear picture of what had happened.
We now know what had happened, but at the time we did not, until we obtained ADS-B data, which is GPS data that is transmitted from the aircraft up to a satellite and back down to the ground. The company that provided this is called Aireon. When we looked at that, we were wondering whether there might have been a similarity with the Lion Air crash. When we compared the 3D profile of the plane flying, we said that this looked very similar to it. It was at that point that we decided to ground the aircraft because we had evidence.
To my knowledge, today we are the only country that ever explained why we grounded this airplane.