Boeng has listened to the complaints of the mechanics and service personnel and have tried to eliminate those problems on the B777. They created Integrated Product Teams (IPT) and on each major system and component installation there was a line mechanic and a Maintainability Engineer on the team. Final approval of the design could only be signed off by the Mechanic and the Maintainability Engineer. Did they get it right, only time will tell.
On all modern aircraft from the 727 onward there have been Reliability, Maintainability and Systems Safety engineers involved in the design. However, there was always an adversarial relationship between the Product Assurance engineers and the design engineers who fought tooth and nail to reject the input of the Product Assurance engineers. There are human factors manuals that identify the problems indicated in the first post in this thread. The manuals set up the work space access and the tool access as well as the visual access for maintenance. The design engineers refuse to work to those manuals as they are not applicable to the design. They say that the contract specifies the manuals to be used by product assurance to verify the design. But when they
bring the design deficiencies up to the designers they are told to piss off.
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The Cat