Thanks Bob - and tucumseh and agrajag. I reckon we are all thinking on fairly similar lines: I mulled this again last night. The serviceability errors/failures/oversights were - like the inadequacies in pilot oversight and continuation training, indicative of an attitude, a team that really wasn't operating fully to the standards required for the task. Their operation was apparently 'safe enough' for long enough to perhaps lull people into false assurance. Of course I'm saying that with hindsight, which is always easy.
But I'm also saying it reflecting on my own experiences, when in a somewhat different engineering environment we - my team - also failed. Fortunately not fatally, but very expensively. When we carried out a full investigation and after action review - I was deputy team leader - we realised that we had allowed urgent operational pressures, time constraints and commercial pressures, plus some equipment shortcomings, to slowly erode our normal safe way of working. At first all went well because we had enough additional protections in place, and good people involved. That masked our reduction in safe practice and we became (in effect) complacent at out new lower level of safe operation. (Normalisation?) (And of course some up the management line took this to show that we had been overly cautious hitherto!) Eventually the holes lined up and we were very lucky to get away with just a costly lesson. I had the cold shudders quite a few nights after that, thinking about what could have happened, how many people could have died - because of my (our) concentration on the wrong things.
Looking at this accident, I wonder. If the team had stepped back and looked dispassionately at themselves, could they have realised that neither the engineering nor the flying operation was as tightly controlled as it needed to be? Hindsight is wonderful !
Agrajag - the comments you made about ageing and loss of experienced people are very apt. Its depressing that similar styles of incident and accident re-occur throughout engineering and throughout human activities and operations of all sorts. The loss of 'team learnings' as natural turnover occurs is a challenge everywhere. For us gnarly old types there is an element of frustration when we see or hear of the same old errors happening,and for the new young characters there is exasperation sometimes when we mutter 'oh, no again!'. If only there was a simple way to transfer all the old, hard won, lessons into new heads easily !