Comment by cjrp

You mean AV Herald? The site says you can't use a relay service to access it. For example, Apple Private Relay.

The parallels with AA Flight 191 are striking. In THAT accident it was found [1]:

1) improper maintenance—American Airlines had used a forklift shortcut to remove the engine and pylon together, rather than following McDonnell Douglas’s prescribed method

2) The detachment tore away part of the wing’s leading edge, rupturing hydraulic lines and severing electrical power to key systems, including the slat-position indicator and stall warning (stick shaker).

3) The pilots followed the standard engine-out procedure and reduced airspeed to V₂, which caused the aircraft to stall and roll uncontrollably left. This procedure was later found out to be incorrect.

Defective maintenance practices, inadequate oversight, vulnerabilities in DC-10 design, and unsafe training procedures combined to cause the crash, killing all 273 people on board and leading to sweeping reforms in airline maintenance and certification standards.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6iU7Mmf330

This video from an aviation youtuber contains a picture of the engine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4q2ORhIQQc&t=526s (the video itself is also worth watching in full IMHO).

What strikes me as odd is that this looks like the "naked" engine, without the cowling/nacelle that usually surrounds it? Anyway, if an engine departs the aircraft shortly after (last-minute) maintenance was performed on it, that's indeed suspicious...

From all the annals of aviation disaster, flight 191 is possibly the one that haunts my nightmares the worst. Perhaps because the scenario feels plausible for every single take-off. Perhaps just because of the famous photo.

How is that video "insightful"? You can summarise the entire video as "a plane crashed after takeoff. It had an engine fire".

PPRuNe[1] is another good one. Just be aware that all of these sites have a mixture of commentary by professionals in the air transport industry, amateur enthusiasts, and random bystanders.

Best advice is always to wait for authoritative statements.

https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/669082-ups-md11...

The engine that fell off (!) had been worked on for two hours at Louisville, KY immediately before takeoff. Occam's Razor suggests that whatever they did right there is to blame.

Maybe the maintenance is better in the other country.

Either way, to say it's "likely relevant" is a huge leap. We have no idea what caused the crash - it could be a million things and likely some combintation of them.

There's a lag time between such cost saving measures and piles of dead people.

See also how FAA allowed Boeing to oversee its own certification for MAX.

As someone who used to work at one of these foreign maintenance stations,

Firstly, fuck you.

Second, this shop consistently rated higher across all metrics, including those inside the US. Loss time injury rates measured in the millions of man hours.

Third, 80% of my job whilst there was to build software for QA and their rigourous on-going inspection reigeme that included yearly in person audits lasting weeks from FAA inspectors, EASA inspectors and every other country and airline this base overhauled.

Take your uninformed bs and hit the road. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about and insinuating that they're outside the reach of the FAA shows you know exactly 0 about the certification process that keeps millions of people safe on a daily basis.

I wonder what the FAA does organizationally that lets it function properly to find cause. It must be highly tempting to blame things on the foreigners and stuff like that. The Air India crash had a lot of that going on.

The 737 Max crashes were also so frequently explained by online commenters as because of “outsourced software engineers” and so on.

But the FAA/NTSB always comes through with fact finding despite the immense political pressure to find these facile explanations. Organizationally, someone once designed these things well, and subsequently it has been preserved so well.

When I see so many American institutions turned to partisan causes through an escalation of “well, they’re doing it” it’s pretty wild that this org remains trustworthy. Wild.

"TDLR 10-20 years ago, the US started allowing maintenance of domestic planes in foreign countries, outside the reach of the FAA’s inspections"

There are foreign planes entering US airspace every day, carrying thousands of passengers. They are also serviced by foreign technicians, outside the reach of the FAA's inspections, and they seem to be doing just fine.

"Foreign" in itself isn't bad, you just need to choose/require reputable partners. If you outsource your maintenance to the same crews that maintain jets for Polish LOT or Taiwanese China Airlines, you may save some money and yet get excellent service, as those airlines aren't known for having safety problems.

Kosovo or South Sudan would be a different story.

> TDLR 10-20 years ago, the US started allowing maintenance of domestic planes in foreign countries, outside the reach of the FAA’s inspections

Foreign Repair Stations date back to the 90s [1], the thing is they need to be supervised by an FAA Certified Mechanic. Inspection of these was already a hot issue in the early '00s... No one gave a fuck, it was all about saving costs for a very long time.

The linked 2007 report's second page (!) already leads with this:

> Since 2001, eight commercial air carriers have gone through bankruptcy and one has ceased operations. Fuel prices remain high, and this makes cost control a key factor in both the sustained profitability and overall survival of an airline.

IMHO, this is a perfect example why the government needs to regulate prices in safety-critical industries. The "race to the bottom" must be prevented - sorry, flying NYC-SFO for 70$, that's not sustainable.

[1] https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/Web_File_Foreign...