If a proper inspection is carried out using Schedule 5 (aka FAR 43, appendix D) and the proper advisory material used, such gross defects as revealed in the C210 would have been revealed without the need for an SID type document.
Hear! Hear!
Beware Sarcs. It’s easy for ATSB to be hairy-chested in the face of the disunited bunch of glorified social clubs that pass for representative bodies in Australia. All of this is merely part of a pantomime intended to justify compelling almost all of the GA fleet to move off the CASA maintenance schedule.
… The manufacturer’s maintenance schedules are generally considered to be the most appropriate for the maintenance of most aircraft types. …
Considered by whom, on the basis of what data?
Who is saying that the manufacturer’s maintenance schedules are anything other than a pluck? (I know: It’s the manufacturers … who make money out of scheduled obsolescence. Plus all the other people who think something can’t run properly unless it’s constantly fiddled with …. and who happen to have a financial interest in being employed to fiddle with things or to make sure that things are constantly fiddled with.)
… Maintenance information issued by the aircraft and component manufacturers (including special and supplemental inspections) is taken to automatically form part of the manufacturer’s maintenance schedule, and as such, forms a mandatory part of the maintenance regime. …
Misleading.
Maintenance “information" issued by the aircraft and component manufacturers may or may not form a “mandatory part of the maintenance regime”.
… Instructions for the periodic inspection of the aircraft empennage (Part 2, Section 1 of Schedule 5) were to ‘Inspect the wing and empennage to fuselage attachments and surrounding structure’. The schedule specified that the inspection was intended as a thorough check of the affected part to determine whether or not it would continue to be airworthy until the next periodic inspection. …
Incomplete and misleading.
Schedule 5 does not specify what the inspection is “intended” to be. Schedule 5 specifies what the inspection is
required to be. It is
required to be a thorough check to determine whether the thing inspected will continue to be airworthy until the next periodic inspection. If that cannot or does not happen, an inspection against Schedule 5 must not be certified. If it is, that's a breach of the law.
Schedule 5 requires more than just the “mainplane [wing] and empennage to fuselage attachments and surrounding structure” to be thoroughly checked to determine whether they will continue to be airworthy until the next periodic inspection. Schedule 5 also requires the “internal structures and spars”, among other components, to be thoroughly checked to determine whether they will continue to be airworthy until the next periodic inspection.
In the case of the aircraft the subject of the report, I find it extraordinarily difficult to accept that the wing and empennage to fuselage attachments and surrounding structure, and the internal structures and spars, had been the subject of a thorough check to determine whether they would continue to be airworthy, this side of the start of this decade. Have a look at the pictures in the report and tell me all those cracks and failures occurred within the last 109 hours’ normal TIS.
In my view, the problem isn’t the CASA maintenance schedule. The problem is, in my view,
compliance with the CASA maintenance schedule.
Yes: The out of control Frankenstein that is the regulatory reform program is inexorably increasing the level of confusion.
No: The answer is not to mandate systems of maintenance or manufacturers’ maintenance schedules.
A failure properly to inspect is a failure properly to inspect, whether it’s done under a system of maintenance, the manufacturer’s maintenance schedule or the CASA maintenance schedule.