This needs to be sorted out in public. Guessing at who did or did not do what and for what reason is not very satisfying to the thousands of passengers affected.
What a shame on aviation to be exposed like this to their customers.
All I have heard so far is from the CEO of the airline and Nada from the FAA. I've read the AD and it seems pretty straight forward in achivieng a return to the original level of safety presumed when the plane was delivered. It even cites a cost of about $1000 per aircraft to bring it into compliance and of course the operators have used resources in a first attempt to meet the AD.
To me, just the fact that they had to examine the wire bundles goes a long way towards meeting the safety intent by assuring that the wires are not damaged. Yet by admission of the AA CEO they didn't get the spacing perfect when they relaced the wires.
The worst I can infer from this would be that the presumed reduced level of wear out of the wires was not fully acchieved.
OK, so to me that means you go back and revisit the maintenance action again... but not immediately before the next flight
So who in hell decided that they needed to put the aircraft on the ground and to hell with the repercussions to the people who had bought tickets and planned on a normal travel day.
Safety has a price, it's measurable both in the reduction of risk and in the cost to achieve this reduction.
To me all that was needed to be done was for AA to submit an AMOC (Alternate Means of Compliance) and continue flying for an agreed amount of time until they could revisit their work in this area at a schedule maintenance visit. Redoing this work in an emergency fashion is now more likely to introduce a human error element and screw something else up that could be serious.
What have we broken?
Where are the safety professionals in all this?
If we relegate the regulator to bean counting then God help us.