Engines:-
In the 'Machiavelli' scenario, records have been deliberately destroyed to protect those who failed to manage the aircraft properly. In the 'Marx Brothers' scenario, the records have ben inadvertently destroyed because those charged with managing them had no idea how to do the job, and have simply cocked it up. I admit that I tend towards the latter explanation.
tucumseh:-
It is easy to date the instructions not to maintain airworthiness, as the evidence exists in (e.g.) reports from the Director of Flight Safety. In AMSO, the pressure was on from 1990, and by June 1993 any thought of a full audit trail was long forgotten........The same year (1996) the Chief of Defence Procurement confirmed he no longer needed engineers managing engineering projects, so very few were left to train new entrants anyway. (And in any case, the new entrants skipped the previous 5 or 6 grades, so had no grounding and no concept of what their predecessors had been required to know.
"Machiavelli, meet the Marx Brothers..."