Originally Posted by
bcgallacher
I do not know how the U.S. Military operate
No surprise, but I'd be careful about not using a grain of salt on this article. Given the narrative the author is promoting ... I'd be skeptical.
If the Air Force really wanted someone to blame for Lowry's crash, it could have gone back and figured out why no one had done anything following the earlier, identical mistakes. "Cross-connecting the rods is an easy mistake to make," an Air Force report warned after the 1986 foul-up. "We ought to fix it so they can't be connected wrong," a second said. The Air Force ignored that recommendation and even failed to warn its mechanics of the danger.
Depending on what maintenance manual one is working from, there are "CAUTION" and "WARNING" flags for certain maintenance procedures which, if gotten wrong, can cause damage, injury or death.
Typically, when one breaks a flight control linkage and has to put it back together to complete a repair, a QAR or CDQAR has to inspect the work. That was true in the Navy before I got into aviation in the early 80's, and I suspect the Air Force is/was at least as critical of flight control linkage repairs.
What this article asserts is that the maintenance manual and / or maintenance training didn't address a known nuance in a flight control assembly and disassembly. How many people are on the job isn't the issue.
I would presume that once a repair was done, the aircraft would have hydraulic power put on it and the flight controls moved through the range of motion to check for proper response
before it was ever issued for flight. If that functional check was not part of the maintenance procedure at the time, in light of previous accidents, then one can easily argue that a "system error" was a major contributing cause of this accident.