Originally Posted by ramp9

Hindsight is always 20/20, but claiming the company "doesn't care about safety" because they followed the exact engineering data they were given completely misses how fleet maintenance works.

Definitely playing devil’s advocate here, but look at it like this…

Imagine you manage a fleet of 250 GMC Tahoes. GMC corporate sends out a routine, non-urgent service bulletin saying, "Hey, we noticed a hidden bearing deep inside the transmission can wear down. Our engineering team evaluated it and determined it is not a safety threat. Just have your mechanics take a quick visual look underneath during standard oil changes."

To actually tear down the transmission and replace that internal bearing proactively would cost $5,000 per truck, or $1.25 million across your fleet, and cripple your daily operations. When the manufacturer explicitly tells you it’s a low-severity item, and the regulators haven't issued a mandatory recall, no fleet manager or accountant on earth is going to disrupt their entire operation and spend over a million bucks. You trust the data and work it into normal downtime.

Now imagine it turns out GMC’s internal safety board discovered years ago that if that bearing snaps, it can lock up the transmission at 70 mph and destroy the driveshaft. But, they hid that risk analysis from the bulletins and the regulators. That is exactly what the NTSB hearing just exposed with Boeing. The airline didn’t necessarily ignore a known danger to save a buck, they followed the exact, legally mandated data stream provided by the entity that built the airplane. You can't mitigate a catastrophic hazard if the manufacturer's own service documents tell you the hazard doesn't exist.

I wasn’t able to listen in for realistically any of the NTSB investigation myself, but reading the wave tops in various articles it doesn’t sound to me like UPS was given a fair chance. That said, FedEx took the information differently and made some adjustments to their “Tahoes,” so that is another factor to consider.

We’re all trying to digest this new information, but I think everyone should step back and put the bias aside to look at the facts as they stand. Maybe I’m trying to rationalize their actions (inactions?) because I know less financial unknowns that exist for UPS, the less they have to hide behind regarding “financial instability.” And that could get things moving in the right direction in other areas that we may also be invested in as pilots. But I won’t blame UPS out of pure spite.