Evidence of meeting #6 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 43rd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was aircraft.
A video is available from Parliament.
5:10 p.m.
Capt Scott Wilson
The disagree alert is common in the 737. We had it on the NG and were supposed to have it on the Max.
I believe the issue you're most particularly speaking to is that the “AOA disagree” was an option—
5:10 p.m.
Capt Scott Wilson
—but it was an option on the NG as well.
Ultimately, for that indication there is no checklist, there is no training associated with it. It's a bit of a red herring that it is itself being put forward as a safety option.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
Helena Jaczek Liberal Markham—Stouffville, ON
Thank you so much for coming. Obviously we want to acknowledge your dedication to safety on behalf of the public and your crew.
Notwithstanding your expertise and what we heard, a little bit, from your opening statements on collaboration, unfortunately two tragic events have occurred.
I'd like to explore a little bit more about the collaboration between airline carriers and the manufacturer of the new or amended product.
Could you just outline...? Boeing gets an idea to improve a certain product. Presumably this idea comes from pilots, from people who are using the plane. Then, is there some immediate discussion with airline carriers at that point as to how to go forward with this presumed improvement?
The question is to any of you.
5:10 p.m.
Vice-President, Flight Operations, Air Canada
I've been involved in many aircraft introductions, and it's been made very clear by Transport Canada certification that they are not certifying the aircraft for any individual carrier; they're certifying it for the people of Canada.
We generally don't become involved in the discussions on the certification side. They come to an agreement on the certification of the aircraft. Boeing produces the manuals, Transport Canada produces their supplement, and we use that information and determine how we're going to operate our aircraft.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
Helena Jaczek Liberal Markham—Stouffville, ON
Perhaps I misunderstood Captain Hudson.
It appeared from your testimony that you have been very involved from the beginning of introducing new amendments.
5:10 p.m.
Capt John Hudson
Well, most of the involvement on the collaboration side of it has happened following the entry into service. As we have explained, the actual entry into service—the certification part of the Transport Canada role of validating or certifying aircraft—is not typically something we get to have collaboration or involvement with.
In this extraordinary event that happened, however, as I was trying to explain, we collaborated among the three airlines, because we took it upon ourselves, under the leadership of national operations at Transport Canada, to....
First of all, we were all reacting in a combined call when the emergency directive came out, and those of us who were a bit more the technical experts or subject matter experts thought at the time—and again, this is in a “time compression” time frame—that we could go further.
That started us down this post-Lion Air emergency directive process of making sure that when we changed an operation or we had an idea or things like that, we would....
We collaborate regularly with Transport Canada anyway, on the operational side. The thrust of my comments, then, was post-entry into service, not on the certification side.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
Helena Jaczek Liberal Markham—Stouffville, ON
Thank you for clarifying that. I find it very important.
I was also incredibly impressed by the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure report of the U.S. Congress. In that report, they actually mentioned that some foreign carriers asked Boeing about providing simulator training for their pilots transitioning to the 737 Max, and apparently Boeing opposed such training.
Presumably none of you was involved in this request for simulator training. Were you aware of this?
5:15 p.m.
Vice-President, Flight Operations, Air Canada
I'll start off and I'll let John and Scott finish.
At Air Canada, we only fly the Max aircraft, so we weren't involved in any discussions on the transition of NG pilots to Max pilots, whereas both Sunwing and WestJet were. I'll thus defer to them.
5:15 p.m.
Capt Scott Wilson
The benefit, coming off a common type such as the 737 NG—or the 800, in our case—to the Max 8 is the commonality of the training, the commonality of the systems, and you train out the differences.
I believe the point of your question was that Boeing was saying that certain training wasn't required. We weren't involved in any of those conversations. What happens is that as the aircraft is certified in Canada, we take a look at it. It has certain training requirements with it, and we basically as a minimum meet them and often, in certain cases, exceed them as we enter the aircraft into service.
It's important to make sure that the training is tailored to the background experience of the pilots, whether they're new on a type or whether this is a transition following many years of experience.
5:15 p.m.
Liberal
Helena Jaczek Liberal Markham—Stouffville, ON
Would you as carriers like to be involved earlier in the process; in other words, before the state of design has certified it? I think we were fairly confident about what we heard about Transport Canada when Canada is the state producing the design, but obviously what we're reading here, in relation to the congressional report about the FAA, seems to really question whether Transport Canada should trust the FAA.
Is there any role for carriers earlier on in the process, related to either certification or validation?
5:15 p.m.
Capt John Hudson
That's a great question. There's always is some communication that happens, certainly in our case before our first aircraft came, and we were quite collaborative with Boeing in that respect. However, you have to know what your expertise is, however, and we are not test pilots for aircraft certification; we are operators. There's a very different set of skill sets there and a very great difference of expertise. I think you have to be careful when you start to involve the operator too much in the initial certification of an aircraft.
Transport Canada, in its certification process, has test pilots, and they do certification work. In commercial aviation, however, we have a very significant delineation between pre-certification and post-entry into service. We are operators.
I said in my testimony at the beginning that I have conducted “customer delivery flights” and “customer test flights”, but that's post-production; it's from an operator's standpoint. I would caution that we want to keep the expertise in its lane. We're good at operating the airplane, but I certainly wouldn't have expertise in the certification, in many respects, of an aircraft.
5:15 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Vance Badawey
Thank you, Mr. Hudson, and thank you, Ms. Jaczek.
Mr. Barsalou-Duval.
5:15 p.m.
Bloc
Xavier Barsalou-Duval Bloc Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
From what I understand, all three of you were pilots before taking up your current positions. So my question is for all three of you.
I imagine that, as pilots, former pilots or even in the course of your duties, you have often talked to pilots, former pilots or even other colleagues. Prior to the crash of the first Boeing 737 MAX or the second one, did you have any conversations or did you hear from colleagues about any particular problems with that aircraft that needed to be addressed? Were these kinds of comments or information communicated to you?
5:15 p.m.
Capt Scott Wilson
I'll start.
We took a look at delivering the first aircraft in 2017 and then, at entry into service, we had a very easy entry into service.
In our experience in operating the aircraft, up until a year ago we had no technical issues, no training issues and really no negative effects that we could see, operating the Max in service quite successfully.
5:15 p.m.
Capt John Hudson
I would second that. We took our first delivery in June 2018. We had some experience before the tragic Lion Air crash and had no technical issues, virtually, with the airplane. There are always little snags here and there, but they were nothing that made the Max stand out as different from the NG that we're currently flying.
5:15 p.m.
Vice-President, Flight Operations, Air Canada
Immediately after the Lion Air crash, we went back through our FDA program, which is the program that sends data from the aircraft to our computers, and analyzed it along with the pilot reports to see whether we had any flight control difficulties at all on the aircraft to try to better understand that question. We reviewed all of the pilot reports, trying to figure out whether we saw any trends, and there was nothing. We did it again after the second crash, and again we did not experience, with the airplane reporting to us or the pilots reporting to us, any issues that were anything at all similar to what we saw in both these crashes.
5:20 p.m.
Bloc
Xavier Barsalou-Duval Bloc Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC
If you had been aware of the problem with the MCAS software on that aircraft, would your respective airlines still have purchased those aircraft?
5:20 p.m.
Vice-President, Flight Operations, Air Canada
If we had thought there were any problems at all, we absolutely would not have. We wouldn't have taken delivery of the aircraft if we knew there was an issue with the aircraft.
All three of us are responsible to the minister for the safety of the travelling public. All three of us, regardless of who is paying us, take that job extremely seriously. We will never put a pilot, a flight attendant or a passenger on an aircraft that is not safe.
5:20 p.m.
Capt John Hudson
When the emergency airworthiness directive from the FAA came forth, we had to react to it, to the way they, in their airworthiness directive, had gone through their process and highlighted.... They basically in the AD highlighted this system and some of the possible risks with it.
Here I go back to my original comments. There are times when you have to be decisive. This was when our three carriers got together at that time. We were talking about problems with MCAS. We saw that it was possibly at the time—given hindsight—an issue.
5:20 p.m.
Bloc
Xavier Barsalou-Duval Bloc Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC
Would you have bought the plane if you had known this problem existed?
5:20 p.m.
Capt John Hudson
Well, for sure we would have let Transport Canada run through its certification process, so the question is better asked of Transport Canada's certification group. If they had known about MCAS, what would have changed in their process?
Do you understand what I'm saying? We react, because the whole system is based on—
5:20 p.m.
Bloc
Xavier Barsalou-Duval Bloc Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC
I understand your answer.
The presence of the MCAS software was not mentioned in the manual provided at the outset by the Boeing Company. Nor did the pilots receive training on the system, other than one hour on an iPad.
First, is it common to omit information on new products in instruction manuals?
And secondly, is it common to only offer a one-hour training session on an iPad for a new plane?
