Canadian connection
Usually, the crash of a commercial airliner half a world away is the shortest of news stories: a brief description of the location, the number of people killed, a few more details if there are witnesses willing to be interviewed.
But that’s all.
Within a day or so, barring exceptional circumstances, the story slips away.
It’s a harsh reality: the news cycle moves quickly, and people move on to other stories that hit closer to home.
The people in the crashes are strangers, and having a crash occur here seems so unlikely as to be virtually impossible.
Readers and viewers wonder if perhaps maintenance standards at the airline involved were different, more lax — maybe the aircraft involved was older.
People look, and move on.
Not this time.
Not with the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, which killed 157 people on Sunday.
Two reasons — first, that there were so many Canadians on this particular flight, 18 in all, along with many United Nations officials heading to a conference in Nairobi. Secondly, the aircraft involved: it was a brand new plane, barely out of the box. A Boeing 737 Max 8, the aircraft had been in service for four months, and had been in the air for only 1,200 working hours.
The crash comes on the heels of another crash involving a brand new Max 8 — a two-monthold Lion Air Max 8 crashed into the ocean off Indonesia in October after reports that its instruments began sending conflicting information.
After that crash, Boeing officials issued a bulletin telling pilots that a sensor issue might cause the aircraft to automatically point the nose of the aircraft down after erroneously determining that the aircraft was on the verge of stalling, and outlining how to deal with the issue.
The plane is a common one with Canadian air carriers.
Air Canada has 24 of the aircraft, WestJet has 13, and vacation carrier Sunwing has four. The 737 is an airline workhorse, and has a long and impressive safety record — pilots have said, though, that there are features on the newer Max 8 that they were not originally made aware of when this version of the aircraft came into service.
The Canadian airlines say they are confident of the aircraft’s safety, although other airlines aren’t taking any chances: China’s Civil Aviation Authority temporarily ordered the 96 Max 8s Chinese airlines use to be grounded, and a smattering of airlines in other countries followed suit.
Investigators have not yet made conclusive findings about the causes of either of the Max 8 crashes.
Suffice to say that, as news stories go, this one is likely to remain a subject of interest for a fairly long time, at least until the causes of both crashes are fully known.