Transport committee  With respect, Mr. Barsalou-Duval, I don't believe your assertions are quite accurate. The 737 MAX, yes, is a derivative model with a lot of history, but it has yet again been shown to meet the design, the safety standard. There are many aircraft out there flying right now that have a perfectly safe record and were certified 30, 40 or 50 years ago.

Transport committee  I'm trying to understand your question. Actuators of what? Are you speaking to the AOA vane, or are you speaking to the actuator that controls the horizontal stabilizer?

Transport committee  Okay.

Transport committee  I'm not going to be able to get into the details of which aircraft have different numbers of actuators. Some of my specialists who report to me would know that. All I can say is that the compliance to the standards includes an analysis of all the failure modes. It includes a thorough look at the redundancy certain systems have.

Transport committee  It goes beyond that. That's a good question. As I said, some of the failure modes that occurred are still possible within the aircraft. The objective here in general, as is always the case in aircraft certification—or should be the case—is to make the training commensurate with the design.

Transport committee  I wouldn't express that there were many differences. We each have a delegation system. At their very root, or the reason for their existence, they are similar. The key comes down to, in my view, the degree of oversight that is carried out by the authority. We both delegate responsibilities, but in our system and in the FAA, as it should be, the fact you've delegated authority does not preclude, or alleviate the responsibility of the regulator to understand the design.

Transport committee  The notion of a third sensor did come up. However, it is not the role of the regulator per se to impose the design solution on the applicant. This is how the certification process works. The applicant will propose a design solution, and it's the regulator's job to ascertain whether that solution meets the standard.

Transport committee  Yes, certainly. There were a number of changes, some of which were not directly related to the accident. There were some discoveries with respect to the need to separate some wire bundles to prevent some common failures. A lot of the work was done with respect to software changes to the flight control computer, specifically with MCAS, to limit the power and the frequency in which MCAS can fire.

Transport committee  I would start off by saying that there is a lot of false information in that Globe and Mail article. We actually prepared a response. Your question relates to a previous comment by Mr. Barsalou-Duval. The aircraft does not rely on MCAS to be stable. This is a fallacy. The media has taken this and it's gone a little bit too far.

Transport committee  Along the lines of what Mr. Robinson previously indicated, my experience working in this organization is that we would not be prone to not knowing something so fundamental about the design and functionality of the aircraft. Would we have certified the aircraft if it was our responsibility?

Transport committee  Again, I can only compare it to the certification activities that we undertake as the state of design. For a case in point, at the time, the Bombardier C Series, now the Airbus A220, was a significantly more technologically advanced aircraft than the Boeing 737 MAX and was a six-year project, with 150,000 hours that we put into it.

Transport committee  I'm not familiar with the specific concern paper you're referring to. The Challenger is not a fly-by-wire aircraft, so when you say revert to hydraulic, I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to.

Transport committee  In terms of our process, not really. I think I mentioned at the previous committee that if you're speaking of the validation process as opposed to the role of being the state of design or the prime certifier, which I assume is what you're referring to, our process is scalable in that we can increase our involvement or increase our level of scrutiny depending on the circumstances of the particular project.

Transport committee  Not in any structural way...no. There hasn't been any specific component or aspect of our validation process that needs any significant change, but that said, clearly there are going to be other versions or derivatives of the 737 family coming up. We're already aware of those. There's no question, given the events and the history and the lessons learned, that we will be spending more resources looking at the next derivative than we normally would have.

Transport committee  Thank you for the question. It's a very good question, but it's not a new question. We've been dealing with this problem for a number of years. Going back 10 to 12 years ago, aircraft manufacturers started to produce aircraft with systems that were much more highly integrated. In other words, instead of having isolated systems doing their own functions, they are all talking to each other through central computers.