While I generally agree with Romulus, I need to make two points,
1", the work smarter not harder mantra doesn't work in aviation. It is not possible to do things differently in many cases.
There are a number of factors at work here:
- massive legal regulation of airworthiness that requires, among other things, complete traceability and time/event history for every aircraft, without which the aircraft is just scrap metal - this is what killed Ansett. There is no escape from this.
- the continuous search for aircraft performance which results in complexity and lethal penalties from failure to maintain. As someone told me, current designs are no longer fail safe, but the cheaper "damage tolerant" standard.
- the simple fact that bad or insufficient maintenance does not manifest itself for years, and when it does, it may have catastrophic and unrecoverable results. This fact is also a great temptation to bean counters and the unprincipled or lazy, since they will not have to wear the cost of the failure their Mal investment causes.
I view these matters as so important that I seriously doubt that anyone without a judeo Christian or Japanese work ethic is capable of building or maintaining a safe aircraft - there need to be motivations of fear, guilt, pride etc. to make sure the job is done right, and these do not obtain much on the Asian mainland in my opinion.
The second point is that the jhas facility is extremely valuable infrastructure because it's replacement cost is incalculable, or at least in the middle billions. The planning and approval costs for such a facility are stratospheric, not to mention the scarcity of real estate at international airports. Some may have noticed portable office structures inside the hangar - they have been there since at least as early as 1976 since it was regulatorily impossible to modify the original hangar design.
Sorry for the punctuation but it's difficult posting in bed with an iPad and a cat trying to sit on your chest.
Last edited by Sunfish; 5th Oct 2012 at 20:32.