[LINK] Flash drives in the sea?

[Scott Howard]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 10:57 AM, Fernando Cassia <fcassia at gmail.com> wrote:

> Are we talking about the same bulletin? You quote one dated 2010, the
> one referenced is 2011-3-14.
> http://avherald.com/h?article=43778c6b


Yes.  If you click on the directive in that entry you'll see the text I
quoted.


> 741 flying jets (in the US alone) are over 80,000 unsafe seats used by
> half a million passengers everyday and the risk of pressurization
> issues goes up with age. Weighing that risk against the minor 3.3
> million cost of fleetwide update should be a no brainer but this money
> is the only thing that the relaxed implementation period of this AD
> will eventually save.
>

Except that $3.3 million isn't the real number. It doesn't take into
account the time the aircraft are unavailable, nor does it take into
account that there potentially aren't sufficient staff/etc available to
carry out the work without impacting other maintenance, which could
obviously have a flow-on effect.

At the end of the day, the event that triggered this came down to a crew
misinterpreting an alarm. This isn't a fault with the aircraft, and thus
the fix wasn't to fix a problem, it was to make the exact problem more
obvious in case the flight crew misinterpreted the alarm. You can guarantee
that these lights were only one part of the solution, that would likely
have involved everything from updating the on-board flight manuals (which
was covered by the directive) all the way through to training and
simulators.  The 3 years (or 9 years, depending on where you start counting
from) has now expired and there hasn't been another incidence of this, so...

  Scott