Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
There's no explicit mention of the flying spanner in the Preliminary Report, suggesting that he/she was not on the flight in any kind of pre-assigned troubleshooting role.
According to someone knowledgeable from the other forum, it's a common practice in Indonesia to send MX to the outpost.
Here's the full quote:
"In Indonesia, an onboard mechanic/engineer is nothing related to an aircraft having problems from the previous flight. They're there to release the aircraft should the aircraft develop a problem that can be deferred, should that problem occur at an outstation. Placing engineers at outstations can be more expensive than the loss of revenue from 1 seat plus flight pay, because aviation in Indonesia is very Jakarta-centric. Place someone at an outstation and the company has to fork out money for his accommodation and outstation pay, plus transportation to go back and forth to Jakarta or nearest maintenance base, and get a back up person. And you can't just get any engineer certified/rated on the type at an outstation to do stuff for you, the guy has to be approved on the type AND approved by the DGCA to do work for your airline. Now, Outstation based 3rd party contractors can be very expensive because of that. The same happens with dispatchers, and loadsheeters, it's not uncommon in Indonesia to see an engineer and a dispatcher onboard to outstations. Moves by the industry to make the use of certified 3rd party contractors and to make such a thing cheaper was effectively blocked by the previous transport minister in the aftermath of the Air Asia crash in end of 2014, because he seems to believe that safety should be expensive. Heck, he banned the use of centralized dispatch and tried to ban the use of approved weather information in computerized flight plans and dispatch briefs 'because they're not from the national weather bureau', despite the national weather bureau were giving out the same exact information and source as those within the airline dispatch briefs!"