I have, some yars ago in the Western part of Ireland, come under direct pressure to sign off a JT8 that failed a boroscope inspection, luckely for me, other things happened that ment it never came to a direct confrontation with the manager in question. As someone wrote, "with age comes experience and with experience comes confidence", this is very true, I was 25, and I buckeled under the pressure.
I have 2 points to make regarding this.
1 - We as professionals have to realize that pressure to sign a release is never as suttle as "Sign it or else" it is often far more cinister. Often the pressure is put on you indirectly via your roster by means of under staffing/over planning combined with ever increasing amount of cooperate "Information" stating that "in this though economy, we HAVE to be more effective", combine this with a senario of a early morning departure, slot time lots of connecting passengers, then a snag, most people do rush the T/S somewhat in this situation and guess what, 99% of the time the problem goes away, you then pen it off convincing yourself "it was probably just X or Y" this puts pressure on the next guy to do the same thing if the problem reappears, and then you start getting unairworthy aircraft flying around the sky. This leads me on to my next point.
2 - Pressure is very often brought on by ourselves. We as Engineers carry out out proffession guided by our cultural background, this means that a British engineer works in a different way to a Danish, Swedish or any other nationality, we are all diferent. With the advent of this JAR66 licence in europe, one thing that has come about, is more nationalities working together. Contracting as an Engineer in the 1980´s you would find very few other nationailties other than British, maybe a few Kiwi´s and Cannuks, but theese where the exptions. Today there is quite a few other people out the, alot of swedes, some Danes, A good few Bog trotters, Aussies, Kiwis, greeks and a whole range of people from the former eastern block countries. A lot of tension and "My c@ck is bigger than yours" come of all this. The Brits have been given a raw deal in their licence convertions, this is a fact, alot of Brits feel their livelyhood threatened by B1 AND B2 qualified scandihooligans, and rightly so, why should an accountant pay for 2 if he can get away with 1, on the other hand a lot of scandihooligangs feel that Brits carry a bucket of useless facts and trivia around, and if we need to know it will be in the manual. The point I am trying to make, is, lets try to help and learn from eachother, their is only one person benifitting from us arguing, and that is the accountant.
Brgds
Doc