Originally Posted by
SLFinAZ
Thanks for your insight, but if you have a recurring (so not intermittent) issue with a critical flight control system/component would you "troubleshoot" on a revenue flight. The only clearly different variable across the 4 flight segments (that I'm aware of) is the presence of the engineer (in the cockpit?)...
Yes, in a perfect world, they should have (as a minimum) done a check flight to see if they had fixed the problem before performing a revenue flight. But in the real world, taking an aircraft out of service is a big deal (especially if they don't have a ready spare), and a check flight is expensive. Just speculating here, but maintenance may well have made such a request but were overruled by management, (and no one wants to tell management they're not sure if they did the job correctly).