Sunday, March 29, 2020

We're from the Government, and We're Committed to Screwing Things Up, Even for Ourselves

By An Old Friend
Sun, Mar 29, 2020 1:01 a.m.

We're from the government, and we're committed to screwing things up, even for ourselves


Here's a 2016 article ...


... about how the FAA is lax in monitoring airlines' safety deficiencies, the particular examples being maintenance sloppiness at Allegiant Air and its contractors.  I suppose it's an example of "regulatory capture."

In 2015, a fully-loaded Allegiant DC-9 narrowly avoided disaster when an elevator control came loose during the takeoff roll at Las Vegas.  The pilots were able to abort the takeoff, and nobody got hurt.  The culprit was the maintenance contractor's worker who'd forgotten to install a cotter pin when he finished servicing the control mechanism.  The plane had flown 261 times in this dangerous state before the associated nut finally worked itself loose from the control rod.

So that's the first-round story.  But government workers applied another round of incompetence, this one being in their attempt to cover up their first-round, generic/systemic incompetence.  I've highlighted the point at the end of the following brief article: 


Report: Allegiant plane flew for weeks with serious mechanical issue

By Nick Vlahos, GateHouse Media Illinois
Posted May 16, 2017 at 3:13 PM


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"The plane had flown 261 times in this dangerous state before the associated nut finally worked itself loose from the control rod."

Pilots and crew and passengers very lucky. Very robust airplane too flying so long without the necessary safety device removed.