This started as a Grey Maintenance thread but my-oh-my! Haven't we raked up a pile of Grey?
The trend in our business has been towards more and more formal procedures. "Standard Industry Practice" has all but disappeared, and the maintenance training environment has changed. Modern training courses teach systems by flow charts and logic diagrams. We no longer learn how things work in depth, indeed how long would a B747-400 course take if we did? And imagine the cost! Horror of horrors, all those Lonely Planet world explorers would be unable to afford a ticket. The "Shell Suits" would have to take their holidays in Blackpool instead of Malaga and Aussies would have to stay Down Under. Only business men and the rich would be able to afford a plane ride.
Once the MM was a general guide in just two or three volumes. LAMES knew their stuff from in depth training. "B" & "D" licence holders certified Major Overhauls ('D' Check? What's that?) including engine strip down. Now we all have to follow the piles of formal written procedures to ensure standardisation and reduced costs.
Unfortunately, as we have seen above, the written procedures are full of holes, grey areas or they are simply downright wrong. What do we (unqualified?) Technical Services people do when we get a request for clarification of a MM test procedure that doesn't work out? Yes, we ask the manufacturer. Then they confirm that the manual is indeed wrong and they will correct it in the next MM revision cycle. But what mystifies me is how come 'Regal Backwoods Airlines' finds the B7x7 MM wrong 20 years after it was written? How has this test or task been performed previously? Just like the newspapers, can we believe anything we read in the MM? Or the WDM or the SRM? Where do we stop? If we do something wrong just because the procedure is wrong who is to blame? Us or the company? Perhaps the whole approach is wrong. Is slavish devotion to formal written procedures truly what engineering is about?
There's a whole pile of questions to be answered here but maybe its about time that the aircraft engineering industry began a proper internal debate into what direction we are heading. Personally, I suspect that our present course isn't doing anything to improve safety. Does anybody else share my scepticism? I don't propose a return to the 'good old days' of minimal Manuals and "B" and "D" licences (for one thing those days weren't really all that good) But maybe we have gone too far down the "Formal Procedures" route. Procedures do not and cannot cover everything; the engineer must be allowed to exercise skill and trained judgement. Just a thought and a bit of a stir...
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Through difficulties to the cinema