Originally Posted by
aeroengineer
Yes Sir,
It was military mishap but Yanky 72 is a good example of how bad it can get.
Lax/waived inspections. Props keep the government maintenance folks up at night. I believe the engineer who waived the inspection is being prosecuted for lying to investigators. Even after he was retired. That said of course he wouldn't be the first to feel the pressure from higher ups to waive a time consuming inspection to make production and those who were applying the pressure "never heard of him" now that it all went sideways.
Lots of lessons here for all to learn from.
The EMB-120 had a couple of similar prop catastrophes, IIRC those were due to design issues which cropped up early in the fleet service life and were subsequently fixed.
121 airlines at least did seem to take prop maintenance seriously, and looking out for indications of trouble was heavily emphasized to the pilots. Skywest, to their credit, shut down their profitable EMB fleet very quickly after a rash of unexplained serious prop hub issues in 2014. It wasn't initially apparent what had changed to suddenly cause new problems, so they decided not to fool with it anymore.