I've seen Babbitt comment on plenty of stories since he took the reins. I think he's trying to keep involved with the FAA's current events and to also establish a certain bit of name recognition, maybe...

I know y'all want to throw management to the fire. You'd probably not mind throwing your maintenance department on the flames once the thing's hot enough, either. But, speaking as a furloughed CRJ pilot and a current mechanic at a regional, nobody (at my company) seems to willingly violate ADs and inspections. The system is so complex and there are so many hands involved, that it becomes almost inevitable that something slips through the cracks. An inspection gets performed but not properly entered in the computer and voila.. it never happened on paper. Or, if the computer never tells us to perform an inspection... then... it ain't gonna get done, period.

As a mechanic, it seems that there are a lot more ways for the Feds to get their pound of flesh from me than there was when I was flying the line.

I'm sure the true cause with this won't see the light of day, but my guess is that some hiccup in your carrier's maintenance scheduling software missed certain parameters to to trigger the inspection.