Marc Garneau's clinical explanation after the Ethiopian Airlines crash belied the nature of his subject matter—the stuff of deep human phobia
Transport Minister Marc Garneau sat before the requisite Canadian flag backdrop in the National Press Theatre in downtown Ottawa on Wednesday morning, explaining the new information that led Canada to belatedly join a long list of countries grounding the Boeing 737 Max 8, after the second crash in five months involving that aircraft left 157 people dead on Sunday.
As a flight leaves the runway and climbs, “angle-of-attack sensors” measure how steeply the plane is ascending; if the angle is too abrupt, the engines can stall. Authorities now know, based on the investigation into the Indonesian crash, that the sensors were faulty on the Lion Air plane, Garneau said, so the plane sensed that its nose was too high and its Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System —the auto-pilot software—forced the nose of the plane down in an attempt to correct.
But while the tone of his press conference was resolutely keep-calm-for-we-are-carrying-on, the facts he laid out were unavoidably the stuff of deep human phobia. The transport minister emphasized that the picture painted by the satellite data about the similarities between the Indonesian and Ethiopian flights was not conclusive, but it was worrying enough that it “crossed a threshold” that spurred the government to act. There have been no reports of Canadian pilots complaining of similar issues with these aircraft, he said.
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