Originally Posted by
old,not bold
To widen the argument, the inference to be drawn from most of the regulations for ETOPS is that non-ETOPS aircraft have a lower standard of maintenance. That cannot be acceptable.
I think an unappreciated aspect of ETOPS (or at least underappreciated) is that is caused most of the industry to raise their game - resulting in improved safety across the board. There is the more obvious stuff like aircraft designed for ETOPS with improved systems and redundancy (777 being the first), and operators that conducted a significant numbers of ETOPS flights began maintaining their entire fleet to ETOPS standards - rather than maintaining separate ETOPS and non-ETOPS fleets.
But it goes deeper. For example, in the ramp-up to initial ETOPS (EROPS back then), Boeing started looking at the overall shutdown statistics and discovered that a many of those shutdowns were due to known causes with identified fixes. Many operators simply didn't bother to incorporate known fixes - figuring it was cheaper to simply accept the occasional shutdown. Boeing put together a presentation that pointed out just how much each in-flight shutdown cost the operators - not just the direct costs of a broken engine, but all the indirect costs of fleet disruptions, loss of use, remote engine replacements, etc. In short, a shutdown could easily cost the operator over a million dollars (and that in 1980's money) - it was cheaper to prevent the shutdown than to deal with it. After the operators got the message, shutdown rates started dropping dramatically such that now days shutdowns due to known causes with readily available fixes are fairly rare.