Air Canada purchased safety options reportedly missing on crashed Boeing planes

By The Canadian Press and News Staff

Air Canada says its grounded Boeing 737 Max aircraft are equipped with two optional safety features reportedly lacking in the crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia.

The New York Times is reporting the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air jets involved in recent fatal crashes were not equipped with angle of attack indicators and disagree lights that are used by the aircraft’s software system during flight to avert stalls.

According to the report, the safety features are not standard on the aircraft and are offered by Boeing as upgrades.

Air Canada spokeswoman Isabelle Arthur says the airline purchased the features for its fleet of 24 Max 8 planes.

WestJet tells CityNews its 737 Max 8 planes are configured with the disagree lights, but not configured with the angle of attack indicator.

The causes of the Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 10 and the Lion Air crash five months earlier, both on takeoff, are being investigated. Investigators are looking at whether a new software system added to avoid stalls may have been a contributing factor.

Air Canada and WestJet have both removed their Boeing 737 Max 8 jets from service.

Meanwhile, federal prosecutors, the transportation department’s inspector general and U.S. lawmakers are investigating the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) certification of the 737 MAX.

The FAA declined to comment on the software upgrade Thursday but said last week it planned to mandate “design changes” coming from Boeing in its software upgrade by April for the 737 MAX.

Indonesia’s Lion Air did not install the warning light. Lion Air Fight 610 crashed in October minutes after takeoff, killing all 189 onboard. The company told Reuters in November it did not install it because it was not required.

Boeing says it will make standard the safety feature on its troubled new airliner. It will now be included on every 737 Max as part of changes that Boeing is rushing to complete on the jets by early next week, according to a person familiar with the changes.

The person spoke on condition of anonymity because Boeing and federal regulators are still discussing details of the upgrade to the Max fleet, which was grounded worldwide after a second deadly crash this month in Ethiopia.

It is not known whether the same flight-control system played a role in the March 10 crash of the Ethiopian Airlines jet shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa, but regulators say both planes had similar erratic flight paths, an important part of their decision to ground the roughly 370 Max planes around the world.

The CEO of Ethiopian Airlines said Thursday that the carrier’s pilots went through all the extra training required by Boeing and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to fly the 737 Max 8 jet that crashed, killing 157 people from 35 countries.

Tewolde Gebremariam said the training was meant to help crews shift from an older model of the 737 to the Max 8, which entered airline service in 2017. In a statement, he said pilots were also made aware of an emergency directive issued by the FAA after the Lion Air crash, which killed 189 people.

The New York Times reported that the pilots of the Ethiopian plane never trained in a simulator for the plane. Gebremariam said that the 737 Max simulator is not designed to imitate problems in the new jet’s flight-control software. He declined to say whether the pilots had trained on the simulator.

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