Originally Posted by
Peter H
.........
That isn't giving me a warm feeling that the FOD was found by a regular check made on all planes as part of pre-delivery.
I would like to be reassured.
Yes, well, it's a point of view; but we can be fairly certain that a mechanic checked the tanks because that task was on a worksheet given to him or her. In other words it was a pre-planned systemic check; whether it was technically "maintenance" is a matter of semantics. The aircraft are in storage, if I understood it correctly, and there will be a maintenance regime in force for that storage, plus another set of tasks to prepare for removal from storage into service. Somewhere in either or both of those regimes there will be a visual internal inspection of fuel tanks. I see that as a capture of something that has gone wrong, which should be reported and put right once the root cause has been established. The important point is that the capture did its job.
We could speculate that two things actually went wrong, and that each one needs its root cause analysis; firstly the debris should never have got into the tank, and secondly I would have thought that as the aircraft left the factory into storage the debris should have been looked for and found in the course of a final quality inspection. After all, in other circumstances it might have gone to a customer and not into storage. To that extent I share your misgivings.
Boeing is probably ahead of us all; see #1 above; "
That finding led to a robust internal investigation and immediate corrective actions in our production system." I'd like to think they used the MEDA template, since they've given it to the world, but who knows.