So is this a case of widescale availability bias and now everyone is nitpicking airline fastener status?
Or is this genuinely a widescale reduction in maintenance frequency, care and engineering?
Could be a bit of both also I suppose
However increasingly I have been asking a question to determine something like this: “If the overall system is improving, would we see more or less of these kind of events?”
In my experience, it actually is that the level of responsibility that workers are taking for their jobs has plummeted since COVID. Understandably or not, a core backbone of our infrastructure - hope for the future - is basically gone.
So that’s why to me it’s not just availability bias, you can see it almost everywhere and it’s well documented that “give a shit” is not improving, and that means core infrastructure is going to start failing rapidly.
I agree on the "not giving a shit" part and in my observation, the effect is also strong in Germany and Italy.
But I believe it's not due to Covid. While Covid was happening, it became blatantly obvious that wealthy investors can still make 40% appreciation from their housing investments even while the majority of the population was struggling just to get by (and pay their rent). Similarly, investors profited handsomely from stock price increases while the same companies (whose market cap went up) were abandoning their employees, in some cases slashing an entire division with just a prerecorded Zoom call.
In short, Covid showed everyone that there's 0 loyalty for the little man and that trickle down doesn't work.
And I can easily understand how the realisation that hard work will almost never earn you a good place in society will lead to people avoiding the hard work.
This isn't a problem with "trickle down". There's more demand than supply, so prices go up. Make your population grow more slowly, or build more houses, or pay more to live in smaller places. Those are your only options.
Another option would be to distribute wealth more fairly, so e.g. inner city apartments are used for young professionals instead of as occasional holiday homes for the wealthy.
Imagining the state as a perfect parent who'll make everything fair, so should have all the power, is really not a great option, I think. It's better to think of it as a service provider that should get out of the way where possible, including managing things like supply and demand.
The state exists to help solve collective action problems. It’s not about giving it more power, it’s about making it do its job. Taxation is a primary tool for dealing with collective action problems to help align incentives. If people don’t give a shit because the game is rigged, and they know the game is rigged, you have to change incentives so at least people are happy to play the rigged game.
> The state exists to help solve collective action problems. It’s not about giving it more power, it’s about making it do its job.
This is licence to do anything. That's far too broad. E.g. in this case: you're defining too much demand vs supply as a collective action problem, when it's really a political problem (net immigration to country), a state problem (net immigration to particular cities) and another state problem (too costly to build to make it worth people's while). Calling that a "collective action problem" is taking what's a pretty detailed picture and redrawing it in crayon, and then calling for a parent to "solve" it. Just fix the things that need fixing, and leave the things that you want left alone (but you accept the consequences of). Don't give power where it's not needed. Your parents weren't perfect, and the state is far less likely to get it right than your parents were.
Flight attendants on my last flight were joking with people in the exit row that during the pre flight check they are not actually locking the door, all they do is engage/arm the slide. The main male flight attendant said “doors are already locked!” and I said - but are the bolts tight? Guys face went absolutely frozen for a second and then he chuckled and said “we’ll be fine”
> In my experience, it actually is that the level of responsibility that workers are taking for their jobs has plummeted since COVID.
I have heard this repeated a ton. I see it too, but maybe I'm just being trained to see it. Is this an American thing, or do other people in other countries experience this too?
Anecdotally, I don’t feel this way about “giving a shit” in japan. We did have inflation and other issues, but I didn’t notice any big change of the sort here.
> Neil Firth, the Airbus local chief wing engineer for A330, added that the affected panel was a secondary structure used to improve the aerodynamics of the plane. ... Each of these panels has 119 fasteners, so there was no impact to the structural integrity or load capability of the wing, and the aircraft was safe to operate, he said.
While it’s comforting to know that the ultimate outcome of this going unnoticed would have been non-fatal, we don’t yet know whether this was:
1) “after a series of maintenance and inspection failures, a passenger noticed something unusual”; or,
2) “the bolts had been inspected on an appropriate schedule and had since gone missing, and a passenger noticed a new defect before the next inspection was scheduled to occur for this non-critical part”.
It matters whether it’s 1) or 2), or somewhere in between, and I don’t think we don’t know that yet. Public faith in airlines behaving safely is pretty low, and rightly so. I definitely support “treat as a process failure until determined otherwise” for airlines right now. Looking forward to that determination, regardless.
It's also possible that the A&P looked at it and decided it could wait, but then after the passengers noticed someone higher up decided it was not worth the brand risk.
If the fastener is called out in part 21.31, then it would be a required part, but airplanes _never_ fly with 100% of their parts in working order... this one was not required, so under normal circumstances I would assume they'd fly the plane.
Yes, this sounds plausible. Maybe the airline did know about the missing bolts and didn't want publicly admit it.
If they didn't notice the bolts missing it's a completely different story. If 4 bolts get loose, maybe 50 more go loose soon after. It's not impossible that all of them were not mounted correctly and the first 4 were only the beginning.
I’ve been watching a lot of Mentour Pilot on YT lately.
I’d never considered it before but he goes into a level of depth in his incident breakdowns to reference the aircraft maintenance log, etc.
Perhaps unsurprisingly there’s always something “wrong” or “broken” on a machine as complex as a modern aircraft. He’ll often say “Oh this wasn’t working, this was broken, etc but that’s fine and it had nothing to do with this”.
There was a story recently where someone tweeted about a Delta aircraft with chipped paint, expressing alarm. While it’s good to be proactive (especially in light of recent incidents) you’d never hesitate to drive a car with chipped paint…
How many times has that happened on a car? It has to be an exceedingly small number if it has ever happened. I wonder how much of the paint would have to chip off to clog an air filter to the point of interfering with operation. Let alone an aircraft where they literally shoot frozen turkeys from cannons into engines to test for bird strike resilience as part of the certification process.
Point is these recent events are unacceptable but the fact remains there hasn't been a single commercial aviation fatality in the US since 2009. Alaska/Boeing/etc got lucky that there wasn't anyone seated in the two adjacent seats but even then two deaths in 14 years would be an extremely impressive record, and there's no way to know if it would have resulted in death anyway.
A lot of these aviation threads turn into "peak HN" (like this exchange). I don't blindly trust authorities but maybe, just maybe, we should consider that tens of billions of people-flights (made up a metric) have taken place over the past 14 years without a single fatality so the industry clearly knows what they're doing and takes safety seriously.
You can put that safety record up against anything and it comes out ahead by an extremely wide margin. 250k people in the US die every year from medical errors, as one example.
> SWA1380 was in 2018 and resulted in a passenger fatality:
I stand corrected: 1 single fatality from over five years ago across billions of people-flights. Doesn't change the point in the slightest and as I said elsewhere, these incidents are so rare people can recall and reference them specifically as you just did. Other than a major celebrity dying that doesn't happen with any other single death incident.
> The bird strike testing uses thawed birds.
Thanks, again corrected (not trying to be snarky, I like knowing when I'm wrong). Point still stands in replying to someone talking about paint chips.
Indeed. The amount of paint that could possibly be ingested is minuscule, especially as compared to the amount of volcanic ash that could be flown through.
A single car incident threatens a handful of lives. An airplane incident threatens a hundred times that, and on top of that, flying is suspicious and fearful to much of humanity to this day. Humans are superstitious, and so paint chips on a plane matter far more to passengers than paint chips on a car. Whether that’s sensible or not is an interesting discussion, but from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s a real and serious concern in airline travel.
That's not the only reason though, like I said issues in the air are a big problem. Because you can't just stop and get out.
Even on a small airplane with only 2 seats maintenance is regulated a lot more than on cars (you can't use parts without the whole certification trail) and accidents are investigated very thorougly. At least here in Europe, not sure about US.
> Let alone an aircraft where they literally shoot frozen turkeys from cannons into engines to test for bird strike resilience as part of the certification process.
Yes turkeys but not paint chips. Remember when engines were catching ashes from the Iceland eruption that started to glassify inside the combustion chamber?
What happens with accumulated remains of paint chips, we just don't know. Because that's not something that's tested for. It'll have to be a lot of them to matter I'm sure, but some planes are pretty crazily chipping like the A350 was in Qatar.
> Point is these recent events are unacceptable but the fact remains there hasn't been a single commercial aviation fatality in the US since 2009.
The 737MAX disasters were a matter of time. It was pure chance that they didn't happen in the US. The US is not safer here, just luckier. Despite Boeing trying to spin it on "those careless foreign operators".
In fact the reason MCAS was hidden so much was the insistence of American operators that no new training should be necessary.
> A lot of these aviation threads turn into "peak HN" (like this exchange). I don't blindly trust authorities but maybe,
I do trust the authorities, as long as they don't delegate trust to the industry. Because I don't trust the industry.
> so the industry clearly knows what they're doing and takes safety seriously.
Did you really not follow what Boeing did with MCAS?
The first accident was perhaps an oversight, perhaps they really didn't realise what could happen when a sensor failure brought MCAS to pitch down constantly. Not revealing this clearly which would have prevented the second crash was pretty criminal in my opinion.
> Yes turkeys but not paint chips. Remember when engines were catching ashes from the Iceland eruption that started to glassify inside the combustion chamber?
You're able to specifically recall and cite these more-or-less freak occurrences /because/ they are so rare. You're talking about an incident from > 13 years ago[0] and again - no one died.
Show me deaths from paint chips, volcanos, or any other potential risk. How many times a day do you nearly get killed in a car - you're a split second roll of the dice away from getting killed in a car every single day - which is much more common of course. As they say "close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades".
> The 737MAX disasters were a matter of time. It was pure chance that they didn't happen in the US. The US is not safer here, just luckier. Despite Boeing trying to spin it on "those careless foreign operators".
Of course I followed the MCAS debacle but again, zooming out we're still talking about 346 total fatalities (worldwide) across two incidents that were 3-4 years ago. Using my medical errors comparison that's equivalent to roughly nine hours of deaths due to medical errors - in the US alone. All day, every day. In the time since the MCAS incidents which were riveting, worldwide news roughly 1m people have died from medical errors in the US.
Look at any other category of accidental death where the risk applies to a broad population. Nothing comes close to commercial aviation.
I don't mean to sound callous and reduce these deaths to statistics. If it were a friend or family member of mine I would feel very different but the stats are what they are and commercial aviation has an extremely impressive safety record.
We can care about multiple things simultaneously and Boeing (along with increasingly misplaced "trust" in them on the part of regulators) needs to get it together but speaking personally I feel safer on a plane than I do walking the streets of large cities (the murder rate in Chicago alone was nearly 2x MAX crashes last year alone), driving a car, visiting a hospital, or any other number of activities because the stats show it to be.
> Each of these panels has 119 fasteners, so there was no impact to the structural integrity
This feels a bit off. It's implying that 119 fasteners are more than enough, but, if that's the case, why have more fasteners than necessary? How many are "just enough", and how many are too few?
Typical safety factor for anything mechanical is >3x, partly for psychological sense of safety and partly to account for model inaccuracies(that isn't to say only every third screws is needed)
Sorry, on what basis are you making the claim that 119 is the lowest bound of what they could get away with just so it can fly? I've never seen that be the case in aircraft, where everything is designed to tolerances way beyond what you'd see in normal or even extreme circumstances.
Planes work just fine with 50% of their engine offline. Or with a missing exit door, or with 50% of pilots missing. An airbus will fly with 4 of its 5 control computers offline
If it was "just enough" to complete the mission anything going wrong would become a major issue
Great that the part was nonstructural, but it still seems like our could seems terribly to have a loose piece come off midflight and potentially impact other parts of the plane.
It seems like anyone who was in the aviation business when the Columbia disintegrated probably would not share the viewpoint that aero fairings’ attachment points aren’t safety critical.
Yeah but that bolt Flys off on the runway and strikes the following small commuter plane in just the wrong place and you have an accident on your hands
No but Spirit Aero makes both A330 and 737 parts, including fuselages and wing components among others, so while I know this thread was made in jest, the commonality is still worth acknowledging given the greater context.
I don't have full history so hard to know which plane it was exactly, but all the planes listed for VS127 at https://planefinder.net/data/flight/VS127 were delivered between 2011 and 2012, seems somewhat unlikely that it'd be an issue from back then even assuming Spirit was involved.
I once noticed a potential problem (I have zero expertise in the subject) on a commercial flight; I walked to the galley and privately, calmly told a flight attendant, emphasizing my level of expertise and that I'd leave it to them. The flight attendant later stopped by and said it was nothing.
On my next flight, maybe a week later, the pilot announced that passengers may see this thing and that it's fine.
Someday, we might have remotely piloted (with AI!) commercial passenger planes. Probably it won't be accepted for a long time, but no doubt a PE-owned airline will propose it to cut employment and outsource remaining piloting to some lower-wage country, people on HN will repeat the airlines' talking point ('it only has to match the injury rate of in-person pilots!'). I hope you remember to repost your comment then.
> no doubt a PE-owned airline will propose it to cut employment and outsource remaining piloting to some lower-wage country
Culture and history matter. Aviation in America is as safe as it is because the culture of piloting tends to put safety first. As long as there is general aviation and a forward-leaning FAA, I don't see a problem with automating more of air transport.
> 'it only has to match the injury rate of in-person pilots!'
I thought the OPs point is that safety comes out of aligned incentives and autopilot tech can be as good as you want but if there's no pilot then there's no one who cares about not dying in the same way you do, ipso facto, problems will go unresolved until they result in mass casualty
You could today outsource piloting to some cut price under trained pilots but it doesn't pay financially because crashing an airliner is expensive, in the hundreds of millions. They actually tend to hire the lowest risk pilots as it brings the insurance costs down.
> it signals a failure in the maintenance pipeline.
Without knowing the risk caused by it, it may signal nothing of the sort. The mechanics already had cleared the plane to fly. Very, very few planes have any sort of in-flight issue like that. Those facts, rather than our ignorant speculation, signal the state of the 'maintenance pipeline' (if such a thing exists).
Unless they were inspected, acknowledged "not dangerous" and scheduled for replacement some time later. There are whole lists of things that are not required to be in good working order for the plane to fly safely, see e. g. what MEL is.
It may be the case that some failures are expected and tolerated between periodic inspections, and the period is designed to catch anything before it gets too far.
But why not have more buffer in their supply chain so that when someone notices missing bolts, or bolts need to be replaced, they have them?
There are clearly deep quality problems that have gone on beyond the door plug. Something is just off in the culture that it's completely normal to just have a lot of bolts missing, because it's within tolerance. If bolts come loose in non-visible places, that's what inspections are for.
The culture is apparently "eh there's missing bolts and it's too big of a pain to schedule and order them" for something that, in this plane's case, took minutes to fix.
Where is this bit about the supply chain and missing bolts coming from, or the part where someone knew they were missing and ignored it? Was that in a different article?
I guess my main point is that it is very difficult for outside amateurs to judge quality culture. They dont know the risks, severities, and existing controls. Therefore they dont know if something is completely typical and acceptable, or outrageous.
I’ve noticed missing bolts a few times when sitting in wing view seats. Didn’t realize that isn't supposed to be ok. This problem might be quite common.
If a screw coming loose and hitting another surface is a concern, shouldn't the missing fasteners in fact enhance safety? They're the only ones we can be sure won't fuck up the engine or whatever.
So why were there 119 screws if it was fine to be missing 4 in a row?
Aircraft are usually built with a factor of safety of 1.5-2 or so - meaning it's probably only in the design spec for one screw to be missing in a row...
Once I was flying with my wife. She was in the window seat and she noticed that one of the plastic panels on the wall had come loose. She called the flight attendant over and told them. Long story short, they held the flight at the gate until a service crew could come and fix it (which they did by duct taping it back in place). Do you think the other passengers appreciated her perceptiveness, or was there a lot of dark muttering about why she didn't keep it to herself? (Spoiler: it was dark muttering)
> As a passenger you have no idea what is dangerous and what isn't.
If this were true, there’d be no point in paying attention to what passengers reported. I think people do have some idea what’s dangerous.
The problem is the airline is in a CYA/image situation and will tend to do a fix they otherwise wouldn’t at that moment. But those fixes are expensive and cause delays.
Maybe what people need to keep in mind is “speak up about things that matter”. In general, it seems like someone’s willingness to say something has more to do with their personality than the severity of the problem. Some people will flag an FA for a paint chip. Some wouldn’t if an aileron was dangling off the wing.
> During an interview, passenger Gayle Yamamoto told investigators that she had noticed a crack in the fuselage upon boarding, but did not notify anyone.[3]: 5
I certainly regret not reporting a burst tyre while taxiing to depart as we ended up diverted to an emergency landing with all the passengers in brace position. No real harm done but stressful for everyone.
This was on a Dash-8 and I was a passenger seated beside the wing. The aircraft shook when the tyre burst and the cabin crew looked concerned but nobody did anything. Eventually, an hour into the flight, one of the flight crew came back with a torch (it was nighttime) to look at the window at the landing gear.
If your window is before or after the wing then you could possibly see the side wheels (I'm not sure that it applies to every aircraft but I certainly have seen them and have wondered the suspension necessary to land smoothly).
Wow, so not speaking up at the right moment is a bigger thing that I would have imagined. So you were the only one on the plane noticing a burst tyre during taxi out?
I think a number of people noticed (including the cabin crew) but nobody said anything. I guess we assumed the flight crew knew what was going on, but no, that was not the case. This was a Qantas regional flight Sydney-Armidale
Should passengers be breathalysing the pilots too? If cost cutting is affecting safety then maybe it's gone too far. Every missing bolt should trigger a $1MM reduction in an exec's bonus.
> Every missing bolt should trigger a $1MM reduction in an exec's bonus
One of the crowning achievements of the FAA has been resisting the American penchant for retribution. If a missing bolt triggers a $1mm fine for a senior manager, you won't find missing bolts.
I was, in fact, in a flight where one of the pilots didn’t seem… fit to flight when he was approaching the airplane at the airport. He was visibly wobbly. The flight was delayed until a replacement pilot arrived
"The drunkennes of the pilot doesn't matter really, anyway the autopilot does the job" - that is how the representative of Aeroflot was trying to convince the passengers to proceed with the flight when he was called on board after the passengers refused to flight with the drunk crew (usually Russian passengers are fine with drunk pilots, the situation here was an exception because the actual passenger who felt entitled for sober crew and raised the noise was Ksenija Sobchak - the daughter of the guy who "godfathered" Putin when Putin was just a clerk in St-Petersburg city office)
It can be both at the same time, delaying or cancelling the flight can be much safer brand wise than the complaints and negative publicity, even if technically there is no significant risk.
It's common for people to complain enough to get free or comped stuff they did not deserve at any point. As the saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, that doesn't mean that's where the maintenance should go.
Especially after recent 737 Max incidents, people’s levels of concern are higher.
I don’t know how much a typical canceled flight is in lost revenue but I suspect it’s much lower than what Alaska Airlines and others are dealing with now.
> I suspect it’s much lower than what Alaska Airlines and others are dealing with now.
No doubt, given Alaska grounded all their MAX9 since Jan 5, and the FAA grounded all other MAX9 fleets the next day, they are still grounded to this day as far as I know (United has extended their cancellations to the 26th so far). That's some 170 planes not flying their routes or earning money.
Although the FAA has apparently completed their inspection of the initial batch of 40 MAX9s.
It can be minor but still cause a cancellation. It may be non-obvious to the immediate ground crew that it's trivial, and an abundance of caution is obviously ideal when it comes to flight safety.
Even a short delay on departure for a UK to US flight can result in duty time limits being exceeded for the crew, which can result in the cancellation of the flight.
Interesting to see the obvious difference in coverage. Anything that has anything at all to do with Boeing would have Boeing in the title, the first sentence, plastered all over your eyeballs every chance they could get. But when it's not Boeing there's no mention of Airbus in the title and you have to read into the article for five paragraphs to see the first name drop of Airbus.
But hey, to be fair, a negative story about Airbus actually made it onto a prominent position on HN, so that's good at least. Usually it would just be completely ignored and not mentioned.
Moral panic hysteria, but this is a non-story. Airbus came out to defend that that particular panel is held by a hundred plus fasteners.
Passengers should be concerned about shoddy bear straps on Boeing 737 NGs they can't see that were passed off as approved parts to make the production schedule. Boeing had the DOJ in their pocket making false statements about an ongoing NTSB investigation into AA 331 that broke up, likely due to substandard parts, when a 737 Classic would've likely remained intact in similar circumstances. 737 NGs are at variable unknown risk of breaking up on hard landings, runway overruns, and possibly even extreme turbulence. See also: Ducommun scandal.
4 bolts missing, that gives all sorts of red flags. How would a passenger know the limit of number of bolts to be missing before failure? Or be sure other bolts are properly fastened after seeing missing ones? Calling off the flight is absolutely the correct decision.
Totally. But then you would expect no action would be taken based on a passenger reporting something like this. That action was taken suggests that the passenger was the first person to observe something that was a serious enough risk to cancel the flight — and that’s what’s surprising and alarming here.
I worked in aviation for years when I was younger, specifically around aircraft maintenance. If you think 4 missing bolts out of 150 are a red flag then I recommend you do not look at what has to happen for a plane to be deemed not airworthy.
The more pertinent question, for me, is where are those screws?
Are they on the ramp waiting to get ingested into an engine?
Are they jammed in the flap tracks?
Are they embedded into the leading edge of tail surface after flying off in flight at cruise speed?
Its one thing to say that you can fly without those screws on the MEL. Its a whole other thing for parts to be falling off of an airplane in operation, even if they aren't required.
A single piece of metal that fell off of a different airplane is what caused Concorde to crash.
How are those pertinent questions? Even with the answers, you (and I) would have no idea what we were talking about. The only pertinent question is: Do qualified mechanics certify that the plane is safe?
I’m a pilot, not an A&P, but I’ve seen what happens when a loose screw goes where it shouldn’t on an airframe. You should be very concerned about pieces of metal falling off of planes and going where they shouldn't. Its enough of a worry that just about every airport has procedures and a significant budget for managing FOD. Keeping screws (and other FOD) off the runway and taxiways is a multibillion dollar industry for a reason.
A non-required screw that backs itself off and falls off in flight is a maintenance procedures failure (torque or locking compound was ignored). Screws don’t just fall off. Ignoring it because it is non-required is dangerous because it could possibly indicate that screws are being installed incorrectly, including required ones.
Qualified mechanics certify every single non-experimental plane as safe. Yet somehow, planes still crash for mechanical reasons.
> You should be very concerned about pieces of metal falling off of planes and going where they shouldn't.
What kind of risk are we talking about? When did that last happen on a commercial airliner? How many people have been injured that I should be 'very concerned'?
As I mentioned before the Concorde crash is the most famous example of a piece of FOD from a plane causing a crash.
It’s a big enough issue that every airport is required to have a debris management program, and runways and taxiways are regularly swept by specialized equipment.
FOD is estimated to be a multibillion dollar problem by more than one study.
Right, but I don't need to be 'very concerned'; the airline industry is very effective at preventing it.
If I was going to be 'very concerned' about potential risks without considering mitigation, there's fuel tanks exploding, running out of fuel, drunk pilots, hitting mountains, runway collisions, etc. etc. Pieces of FOD don't seem to rate ...
My point is about risk, of course. FOD is not an effective risk to me.
Wikipedia: "Whilst taking off from Charles de Gaulle Airport, the aircraft ran over debris on the runway, causing a tyre to explode and disintegrate. Tyre fragments, launched upwards at great speed by the rapidly spinning wheel, violently struck the underside of the wing, damaging parts of the landing gear – thus preventing its retraction – and causing the integral fuel tank to rupture. Large amounts of fuel leaking from the rupture ignited, "
Concorde had decades of documented tyre problems. That was a flawed design (tyre and fuel tank) that allowed this crazy outcome.
You’ve chosen a very selective quote. What caused the tire to explode in such spectacular fashion?
It was a strip of metal that had fallen off of another airplane a few minutes before.
Concorde did have a higher risk due to its higher takeoff speed, but the only fatal accident in the airframes history was directly caused by a piece of metal that fell off a different plane.
When the authorities you've placed your trust in have demonstrated they're incapable of doing their job to keep you safe, it's normal to take that authority back into your own hands. It would only be hysteria if the Boeing incident hadn't indicated a systemic failure in the air-safety system.
Every aircraft has some missing screws. Literally every aircraft. That's why there's so many of them.
Some of them matter, and the pilots keep a close eye on those during the preflight checks. Others, matter less so. (A single missing screw on a prop spinner - big problem. A missing screw on a non-structural plastic aerodynamic fairing - okay to defer, literally zero risk.)
Safety margins should be at their max before flight, I'm thankful engineers at Airbus put more bolts than required if they go missing mid flight, but before take-off it should be back at 100% safety margin.
No aircraft would ever fly then. You'd be surprised how much equipment on every single flight is inoperative or scheduled for deferred maintenance.
There's an engineered threshold at which an aircraft is deemed not airworthy. On airliners, this is managed through a Minimum Equipment List (MEL), which is a formal checklist that tells the crew which equipment is allowed to be broken (and for how long).
This threshold is less than 100% by design, because little things break all the time. It can take days/weeks in the shop to fix issues, so you need to batch up all the maintenance. (Can you imagine if you had to take every aircraft offline for several days after every flight?) And that's okay, because there's still a large safety margin built in as long as the MEL is followed.
Every time there's some actual disaster on something like a commercial airliner, in the ensuing investigation it turns out there were tons of warning signs - missing bolts, ignored reports, etc. And then people, rightfully, go "why were all these warning signs ignored?"
And now here you are smugly telling us to ignore a bunch of missing bolts and that we're idiots for possibly thinking they could be indicative of a problem. Do you see how this is a big part of the answer to that perpetual question of "the signs were all there, why wasn't anything done?"
I have no horse in this race, but it’s possible that the answer to the first question of why were all the warning signs ignored is that there are a lot of trivial, spurious, or non-relevant reports, and no one retroactively looks at them in most cases because nothing happened. Upping the number of reports might make the problem worse.
In airframe maintenance this is rarely true. In theory you should be proactively dealing with these issues before they are report generating (in the sense of said reports remaining open a long time, all maintenance generates logs in planes). If an excess number of reports are being generated there is an underlying issue, like work is being deferred for profitability reasons, or the maintenance team is being rushed because they are falling far behind.
Or is this genuinely a widescale reduction in maintenance frequency, care and engineering?
Could be a bit of both also I suppose
However increasingly I have been asking a question to determine something like this: “If the overall system is improving, would we see more or less of these kind of events?”
In my experience, it actually is that the level of responsibility that workers are taking for their jobs has plummeted since COVID. Understandably or not, a core backbone of our infrastructure - hope for the future - is basically gone.
So that’s why to me it’s not just availability bias, you can see it almost everywhere and it’s well documented that “give a shit” is not improving, and that means core infrastructure is going to start failing rapidly.