I've edited the following extract from Sunday Times article on January 1, 2006, published after the AAIB slammed BA mx over "systemic" failings.
It seems that no matter how hard they get "slammed" it keeps happening.
The Sunday Times January 01, 2006
Watchdog slams BA's air safety
By the Insight team
BRITISH AIRWAYS jets have suffered mid-air failures because of “systemic” problems with their maintenance, air accident investigators have revealed.
After inquiries into four mid-air incidents, the investigators say that there are safety problems that may be “widespread within the organisation”. They warn that it appears that shoddy working practices are accepted as the norm by some maintenance staff.
According to aviation analysts, the criticism from the government's Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) is unprecedented for an airline that has won a reputation for being one of the best maintained fleets in the world.
...
The AAIB's concerns about the failures in BA's maintenance regime over the past three years are highlighted in a report on the Boeing 757 which took off in September 2003 without two wing panels.
...
They say the failure to check that the wing panels were installed on the Paris flight “seems not to have been an isolated case, but more symptomatic of the existing culture”.
They add: “Ineffective supervision of maintenance staff had allowed working practices to develop that had compromised the level of airworthiness control and had become accepted as the 'norm'. Maintenance errors were not the result of wilful negligence, or any desire to perform a less than satisfactory job, but the result of a combination of systemic issues that had increased the probability of an error being committed.”
...
BA employs 6,000 engineers, compared with 9,500 in 1995 but its fleet remains at a similar size as 10 years ago.
BA said it took the AAIB's latest report “very seriously”. Captain Rod Young, head of safety at BA, said: “The airline accepts the AAIB's recommendations, which identified factors in the maintenance process which led to this incident (in September 2003). These factors were immediately rectified by February 2004 following the airline's own investigation which was carried out in parallel with the AAIB's investigation.
Nuff said.