Comment by chaostheory
10 hours ago
This is likely relevant
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance...
TDLR 10-20 years ago, the US started allowing maintenance of domestic planes in foreign countries, outside the reach of the FAA’s inspections
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.
> Occam's Razor suggests that whatever they did right there is to blame.
Ordinarily yes, but in this case there are reports that the plane underwent a "heavy maintenance check" from Sep 3 to Oct 18, which may have included engine removal and overhaul (source: pprune.org, from a poster who's not given to flights of fancy.)
In the Reddit /r/aviation thread, there are people who spotted that specific plane at San Antonio International airport since it was apparently being serviced at a major service facility there. So yes to major service potentially at issue, and no to international work being at fault.
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Or whoever was working on it said "Wait, this plane isn't ready yet" and the people in charge said "we've waited long enough, get it on the runway".
This doesn't excuse the engineer as "just obeying orders". They are making a tradeoff between being ethical and being unemployed/unemployable, which understandably can be a very hard decision, but it's still their decision and they aren't guilt-free if something happens.
MBA-driven decision instead of engineering decision.
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.
The NTSB is completely independent from the FAA, by design.
The history of how that came to be is worth a read and answers your question better than I could.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Transportation_Safety...
You can't play with the NTSB. Just wait a few months and see, they will literally say the exact reason it happened and who's the one to blame in their report. These guys are the best at what they do. This is one of the government bodies other countries would dream to have.
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Huh, wow, that actually did answer the question. Short version: the FAA did have this failing; the NTSB was created independently specifically to avoid that flaw. For the rest, he’s right, better to read it.
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"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...
The government should just set a higher safety standard and let the companies figure out the costs. Setting a floor price without proper regulation == companies doing the same bagging more $$ -- To be very frank, I would do that if I were the chairman of such companies -- either I do that or I'm madmen getting voted out of my position next year.
> The government should just set a higher safety standard and let the companies figure out the costs.
The problem is, it doesn't work out that way. We lost enough people to that madness - as soon as hundreds, if not thousands (see 9/11) of lives are at stake, IMHO the effort to ensure compliance with standards is so massive, the government could (and should...) do the damn job itself.
> 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.
Are you saying higher prices would lead to better safety?
If so, I think it's optimistic to assume that would be the result, rather than just more profits.
I'm all for tighter regulations and enforcement on safety and maintenance, though.
Super-low prices require razor-thin margins, which leads to cutting corners, which leads to worse safety.
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> Are you saying higher prices would lead to better safety?
Higher prices and regulations.
With no floor on pricing, there will always be enough greedy executives who are willing to cut corners to make money in a ruthlessly competitive environment, fully knowing that it is very hard to prosecute a C-level executive personally.
The other possible result will be that eventually the market "agrees upon" a minimum price floor while being in compliance to regulations - but that usually means that the company will be as bare-stripped of assets and reserves as possible, which means in turn that the slightest external shock can (and will) send not just one but multiple companies crashing down hard. We've seen this with Covid - an economy that has optimized itself for decades on running as lean as possible is very sensitive to all sorts of external interruptions. Of course, that's not directly relevant to safety... but indirectly it is, as the inevitable result of that is an oligo-, duo- or monopoly and then, we've seen with Boeing where that ends, incentives aligned too much to cut corners.
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>this is a perfect example why the government needs to regulate prices in safety-critical industries.
Aviation is one of the most regulated industries to the point where I've heard multiple aircraft maintenance people who don't know each other make quips to the tune of "we only cut the stupid corners because cutting the smart ones is illegal".
I'm not saying it should be less regulated but considering that the aircraft was maintained recently I wouldn't be surprised if some dumb "well you didn't say we couldn't do it" thing that isn't technically disallowed but should be covered under some broader "don't be stupid" rule was ultimately a causative factor.
> 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.
This is nonsense. Commercial aviation is already ridiculously, insanely safe and has been for decades. Your proposed solution would not have done anything to prevent the one major accident in the past 15 years of commercial aviation in the US, which was caused by a military helicopter pilot violating an ATC restriction in complex airspace, not a maintenance issue.
What evidence do you have that "NYC-SFO for $70" is not sustainable? From March 2009 to December 2024 years in the US, the fatality rate in commercial aviation was 0.4 per passenger-light-year. That's nearly 15 years of operation with the foreign repair stations that you are accusing of putting profits before safety.
This is, like, the most ridiculous industry possible to demand more regulation of.