Originally Posted by
Bug Smasher
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.
From the article:
Eight different Chautauqua CRJs conducted more than 9,900
the airline operated another CRJ on 231 flights without inspecting a different section of the lower wings for cracks
Another Chautauqua CRJ made more than 17,600 flights between November 2007 and January 2009 before mandatory inspections of the plane's GE engines were performed. Chautauqua also flew one of its Embraer 145 regional jets for 43 days past the time one of its inertial navigation units should have been replaced
Numbers like this do not support your theory of a "hiccup" in the system. Furthermore, what you're saying is that because the system is so complex that it's ok if things "fall through the cracks"...hey, it's only people right? Your statement is exactly how management would want to sweep this under the rug.
So, how is it that many other CRJ and ERJ operators subject to the same inspections and AD's can adhere to regulatory compliance and CHQ can't? Or better yet, how much money did Bedford save by looking the other way in relation to the FAA fines?
You get the picture, I give you an A for effort, but no one is buying it.