I recall a lot of fingerpointing minutes after the crash by people blaming the presumably foreign maintenance crew.

Even now there is a lot of uncertainty around this crash, maintenance - or lack thereof - or even wrong maintenance could still be a factor. But given the location of the part asking for a 'visual inspection' is a pretty strange move, the part is all but inaccessible when it is in its normal position and even with an endoscope it would be pretty hard to determine whether or not the part had weakened. That's just not going to show up visually until it is way too late unless the part has been especially prepared to announce the presence of hairline cracks.

You'd have to disassemble a good chunk of the wing to gain access to the part based on the pictures I've seen of how it all holds together when assembled.

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mrtksn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> blaming the presumably foreign maintenance crew

The same happened with MCAS, the pro-Boeing argument was that if those were American pilots it would have been fine.

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nickff an hour ago | parent | next [-]

As a matter of fact, the same issue did occur to US-based-airlines, and the pilots did catch it. That does not however answer the question of whether they just got lucky, or were more skilled, though there are some indications that it may have been skill.

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mrtksn an hour ago | parent [-]

I'm sure that a flaw in the plane can be handled more gracefully by the more skilled set of pilots however that's not the point really. Their point was that the flaw in the plane wasn't a big deal and the loss of life and equipment wasn't Boeing's fault, which wasn't true.

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benced an hour ago | parent [-]

The reason we focus on the OEM more than the pilots is that Boeing getting its act together (or being regulated to do so) is more scalable than every pilot in the world becoming more skilled. Individually blaming pilots isn't effective, regardless of whether you're morally for or against it.

	▲	mrtksn 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Nope, we are focusing on Boeing because their product turned out not to be functioning as advertised. There are many peculiarities in all machines, including the planes and we often handled that by trainings and warnings. There's no laws dictating that machines should be operable by dummies, especially in professional environments.

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Dylan16807 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not really the same. Pilots need extensive training for how to handle emergency situations and maintenance crew don't. It's not super harsh to say that pilots in different regions are at different levels for those weird situations. It is super harsh to say that maintenance crews in some regions can't do their baseline job.

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mrtksn 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

That's entirely false, the maintenance crew are highly trained people they don't figure out things on the go and when they have to figure out solution to an issue, it's based on when they know about the aircrafts from their training.

	▲	Dylan16807 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Maintenance crew are highly trained people that in strange situations can pause their work to figure out a fix and ask experts what to do. Very different from how a pilot has to handle strange situations. Being ready for anything in an airborne plane without a pause button is so much harder, impossibly hard, and not every air authority tries as hard to reach the impossible.