CAAAD
I was in full agreement until the last paragraph. The Safety Assessment called for by FAR 33.75 is not easy to do . If it were we would never have any unpleasant surprises. In general the discipline is a pretty good coarse filter and certainly better than nothing.
Of course you are right about the exact specification JAR-E etc.
And yes I would agree about it not being an exact or easy to do.
But where would we be without such a requirement? Should we simply tell the public that life's a bitch and some engineering mistakes are gonna really knock your socks off?
We must have regulations that ensure that the best safety processes are followed. The idea is to enforce that lessons learned are really adopted in design practices overseen by a regulation and should the argument be placed forward that it's too difficult in some area then at least there should be a fall back to a "prime reliable" approach that forces a specific attention to detail a least equivalent to the design, and maintainence controls placed on a rotor disk itself.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying they did it wrong, I'm simply saying that we must ensure that everybody does it better in the future.