Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members.
When I testified to this committee on March 10, I was asked if I'd table my findings at that point. I did so confidentially, with the desire and the idea to give Boeing a fair opportunity to answer the questions that were then 24 main questions over 44 pages in the document I had sent them. I can tell you today, after nearly nine months, that Boeing has not answered any of my questions and didn't even try to contact me. It's disappointing but hardly surprising, given they didn't even respond to an invitation to testify to the same committee on March 10.
After my first testimony, I reviewed the interim report on the second crash and also all of the FAA's documentation towards lifting the restrictions. Only a few of my main questions have been answered, minor ones. Furthermore, my list of questions grew from 24 to 37. On September 21, I made all my comments available as seven downloadable attachments. It's comment serial number 172 on the FAA site. Here are the highlights of my cumulative findings.
The emergency airworthiness that was issued after the first crash deprived the operators and crews of two of the four critical, logical steps that allow an MCAS command to be executed. First is the flaps. If they are deployed to any non-zero position, this disables the MCAS. The other thing that is the next MCAS command was going to come five seconds after the completion of the previous one. Had the ET302 crew been aware of these two things, their chances of recovering would have been much, much better. If you doubt any of that, please ask me during the question period.
The fleet should have been grounded after the first crash. Many arguments have been heard. The main one, in my opinion, is that the FDR data, the flight data recorder data, in the preliminary report of the first crash clearly showed not only the MCAS but also the stab trim system doing something really, really abnormal. Another thing that's less talked about is that there's a precedent, Falcon 7X by Dassault Aviation. The whole fleet was grounded at the request of the airframer, not the authorities, after an incident took place involving the pitch trim system that didn't even lead to a fatality. Also, nobody in this industry should be making any concessions for the pitch trim system since the Alaska Airlines flight 261 accident in 2000.
In my first testimony, I also made recommendations for changes to regulations. I am not going to go over them here again. We can talk about them later.
Here are the technical arguments that I want to talk about that are 100% independent of MCAS.
The pitch trim system on the 737 Max is an obsolete 1960s technology. Its main deficiency is that there's only one electric motor on the actuator for the horizontal stabilizer movement. All other comparable airplanes currently in operation have two motors. Some even have three. The WestJet flight 1245 incident on December 1, 2018—meaning between the two crashes—should be revisited for that reason. Ask me for details during the questions.
The 737 relies on the muscles of the crew as a backup for the single electric motor on its critical actuator. There used to even be a procedure called a roller-coaster manoeuver that is no longer in force, but it was trying to address the fact that this system is inadequate for lack of redundancy.
All of these arguments are difficult for the public to grasp, so let me try to offer you an analogy. Would any of you buy and drive a car today that doesn't have power steering? Obsolescence of the system also involves problems with not using the latest technology to prevent slippage, which I have seen on both flights. It also probably doesn't contain all of the contemporary safety monitor suite that we normally implement for such a system.
I show, by comparing to an existing monitor on another aircraft, that the slippage on ET302 would have been very easy to detect and passivate.
Let's talk a bit about the first crash. I saw—