Tee-Emm, it's not a PC issue it's an issue of fact... if your hell bent on wanting to live in a world with a blame culture then go-forth and live in the middle east, it will give you the certainty that you so seem to desire.
If on the other hand you are a manager, or senior pilot and actually believe what you are saying then, as said before, get yourself onto a Human Factors course or CRM course ASAP because your attitude stinks and people with your attitude should be thrown out of our industry as soon as we can hunt them down, there is no place in modern aviation for your attitude, you are a dinosaur and I hope your species becomes extinct very soon!
To take this further, people with your Hang-Emm attitude stop perfectly decent team-playing members of our industry from reporting anything because people like you support the sack-Emm attitude, which means SMS systems do not work because people are frigntened to report or provide feedback to the SMS manager/QA/Safety etc... which means that the regulation of "The System" fails... and in case you hadn't noticed whats happened in the "real world" aviation is a self regulating industry so a failure of the safety/QA systems can end up in dead people. Yes when we mess up in aviation people have this inconvenient habit of dying.
So the Hang-Emm school of thought teaches us:
Hang-Emm culture=frightened people who don't report "errors"=failure of the system=dead people
In comparison the Reason model teaches us:
No blame culture=reports=continual assessment and improvement of the system=reduction in the number of dead people
I don't know it maybe just me but I think James Reason may be onto something here.
However to come back to your assertion that "maintenance error" is a filthy phrase that is on your "hang-Emm" side of the fence, well no it isn't! The Reason model and incidentally if you'd read the actual report, you'd have got this...
Maintenance is a generic term to describe a number of differing activities with regard to aircraft, in the EASA zone it starts with Part-M on the Operators side and transfers across to the maintenance organization, Part-145.
The Part-145 maintenance organization will normally cover line & base maintenance, planning, technical support, Quality Assurance & several reporting systems, which include SMS.
Maintenance error in the context of the China Airlines 737 showed that there was a failure of the maintenance process with errors at numerous stages in the maintenance process, these would be failures of the Swiss-cheese blocks that James Reason advocates, so no single person to blame!
Go read the report, it quite staggering the number of individual processes that failed to result in that accident.
Tee-Emm there is no place for your circa 1950's ex-military type attitude in our modern industry, people with your attitude are a danger to themselves, there colleagues, the passengers we serve, and the potential third part victims of an aircraft accident.
Get a human factors course, a CRM course or get out of our industry.
I apologize to the rest of the decent people who frequent this thread for the long post.