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 to other stories that hit closer to home. The passengers are strangers, and the potential for an air disaster here seems more remote. Newspaper readers and TV viewers instinctively wonder if perhaps maintenance standards at the foreign airline involved were different, more lax. Or maybe the aircraft was older. People look and then move on.
Not this time — with the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, which killed 157 people on Sunday.
Not this time — with the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, which killed 157 people on Sunday.
First, there were so many Canadians on this particular flight — 18 in all — along with many United Nations officials heading to a conference in Nairobi.
Second, the aircraft was a brand new plane, barely out of the box. A Boeing 737 Max 8, the plane 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 one involving a brand new Max 8 — a two-month-old Lion Air jet plunged into the ocean off Indonesia in October after reports that its instruments began sending conflicting information. After that disaster, Boeing officials issued a bulletin telling pilots how to deal with a sensor issue that might force the aircraft to automatically point its nose down after onboard software erroneously determines the plane is on the verge of stalling.
This aircraft model is a common one among Canadian air carrier fleets. Air Canada has 24 of them, WestJet 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and impressive safety record — pilots have said, though, that there are features on the newer Max 8 that they were not originally made aware of when this version of the aircraft came into service.
Canadian airlines say they are confident the aircraft is safe, although other airlines aren’t taking chances: China’s Civil Aviation Authority temporarily ordered the 96 Max 8s Chinese airlines use to be grounded, and airlines in other countries followed suit. Boeing stock fell sharply on Wall Street on Monday, adding to the jittery atmosphere surrounding the jetliner.
It’s important to remember that investigators have not yet made conclusive findings about the causes of either of the Max 8 crashes over the past few months.
But suffice it 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.
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