No worries with safety of Boeing 737 Max 8, says McGill prof

An aviation expert from McGill University said he was not afraid to fly on a Boeing 737 Max 8 recently.

Speaking with John Gormley on Wednesday morning, business professor Karl Moore said he took a trip with students from Hong Kong to Toronto to Montreal.

Moore said he was confident in the plane’s safety because of the training North American pilots have compared to their counterparts in Asia.

“It’s been a very high-growth market. (Pilots) very typically have considerably less experience than in the U.S. and Canada,” Moore said.

“The problems that they’ve had with the Max 8 are ones that experienced pilots deal well with relatively easily once they have the training and understand what the issue is.”

Pilots have reportedly experienced sudden nosedives with the plane.

While the federal government has ordered that the planes be grounded over Canadian airspace, the answer to what caused an Ethiopian Airlines flight to crash on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board, remains in question.

In October, a Lion Air flight — also a Max 8 — crashed near Indonesia, killing 189.

The black box from Sunday’s flight has been recovered, but determining what caused the crash could take months, Moore said.

He said it’s in the aviation industry’s best interests to put safety first. It’s the airlines’ pilots, crews and passengers on board so the industry has a stake in it, he said.

“This is a huge part of Boeing’s business going forward — thousands of planes, 40 per cent of their profitability,” he said.

“This is a critical business issue for them. But they recognize that if they do something that is unsafe, that’s the best way to kill Boeing’s business forever.”