bumpthump -
PR was my feeling on Friday, but now the Manufacturer has modified its Alert Service Bulletin making further work mandatory. It seems that the manufacturer has an idea of how to improve fault detection within the epicyclic and want to implement it asap.
Regarding the point about the busses, what about a bus that crashed because its brakes failed - would the model be "grounded" in a flurry of prime time TV news and newspaper headlines? I somehow doubt it, because our perception of acceptable risk for road transport is quite different from our perception of that for air travel.
In the case of the Ford Pinto, there was certainly a fundamental design flaw and many burst into flames after a minor shunt. In the case of the L2/225 we have had one catastrophic failure in tens of millions of fleet hours over 17 years - hardly a fundamental design flaw.
This latest maintenance intervention does seem to be a good idea, but we have to be careful not to over-maintain since every maintenance intervention carries a potential hazard of human error etc.
HC