Agreed. That's not the point of our disagreement, however.
Where we disagree is who is to blame. You want to blame the natural born person (the mechanic) and I want to blame the legal person (the company). As near as I can tell that is the only substantive difference between us.
In conformance with hundreds of years of case law on the subject, the company is the best person to hold liable because the company is the one in a position of power. It sets the terms and conditions of employment of the employee; it hires and fires; it manages the employee.
To me what you seem to want is the old guild system back where the employee is honor bound by his family traditions to do a good job. What rubbish. Come into the 21st century.
If I understand you right you're saying:
1. in the US you can only really hold the company to account, not an individual employee
2. this is a good thing
I would have thought it best to be able to hold
both to account for their actions.
As it stands you're saying a licensed US airline mechanic can do something completely negligent, hence be directly responsible for the loss of 100s of lives and the worst that could happen is that he might loose his job? (I'm talking hypothetically here about an aircraft loss directly attributable to maintenance negligence, not about the concorde/Ti strip incident)