A much better solution would be to automate servicing and release decisions. If part X required to fix fault Y does not pass test Z, the aircraft does not fly. Better yet, and more realistic, is to outsource release decisions to a third party bound by the contract with insurance company. You lose a plane - you pay for damages. Money is a MUCH better incentive in today's crazy world than little things like human lives. Lots of auto-manufacturers (e.g. Maserati) have implemented this system and it works brilliantly.

It certainly should be addressed.

But only once all the higher priorities have been dealt with - and they are legion.

Regulators and accident investigation organisations often obsess about the trees, while the wood burns around them. This is certainly one of those cases. (Manufacturers, in the main, are quite good at trying to make profit, as their first goal, as they should).

The AD specifically makes that point.

The key take-aways from the rather lengthy WSJ article in today's paper:

An interesting view. In 5000 hours on the A320 series at no point did I feel like I was letting an "automated system" handle emergencies. I handled the emergency, and used the benefit of the fly-by-wire and system management to reduce my workload. I can't think of any conceivable reason why I might want to deliberately stall, pull more than 2.5G, or bank beyond 67 degrees a transport category aircraft, but I can think of situations where being able to extract every ounce of performance it can offer might be useful.

FADEC is designed to exploit maximum performance from an engine while protecting it from overtemp / overboost, yet I don't hear people complaining about it.

You are right in your assessment. I doubt that it will be used as an argument for the Max - but expect new designs to be more autonomous and have less requirement for pilots to pick up the pieces of systems failures. Autonomy is improving all the time with fewer cases that the automated systems cannot handle. The costs of making aircraft simple to fly by human pilots in exceptions (all specified in FARs) is approaching the same levels of cost and complexity of building autonomous aircraft that meet DAL-A. Once it is the same or cheaper to build aircraft that are DAL-A and fully autonomous and that are safe in all failure modes, do not expect any support from aircraft operators for aircraft to be designed for pilots.

You might think that there would have been more important things for NHTSA to worry about than the safety of World War II era amphibious vehicles with no particular commercial or military value. However, a marketing genius decided to convert them into tourist attractions in coastal cities such as Seattle. One of them lost an axle on the Aurora bridge and swerved into an oncoming tour bus, killing and maiming passengers in both vehicles. Another one sank in a thunderstorm, killing all aboard (I believe.) While you could argue that the passengers on the vehicle should have known the risks of riding a discarded military assault craft, certainly the Japanese tourists in the properly modern and licensed tour bus had the right to assume that all of the other vehicles on the road were as safe as modern practice can make them.

If there is an unsafe old aircraft out there, somebody is going to find a reason to fly it; maybe they got it for free so in the short term the fuel costs are immaterial. In my opinion, a few man weeks of engineering time is really a small price to pay to ensure that at least the obvious faults are either fixed or the airframe is grounded. Owners of old commercial buildings have have to spend millions to retrofit them to survive earthquakes; a much grumbled about cost but when an earthquake causes mass casualties in other countries the first thing we point to is "lax building codes."

Yes. This is pasted from the AD preamble:

The Boeing SFAR 88 report for the Model 727 showed that a combination of an in-tank wire fault or contamination condition (which can remain latent for multiple flights) and a hot short outside of the tank between the affected FQIS tank circuit and other aircraft power wiring cobundled with FQIS tank circuit wiring could result in an ignition source in the fuel tank. That combination of failures was classified by the FAA as a “known combination of failures” under the criteria in the policy memo due to the similarity of the Model 727 FQIS system architecture and design details to those of the Boeing Model 747 airplane involved in the TWA Flight 800 catastrophic fuel tank explosion accident in 1996. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that an FQIS failure combination as described above was the most likely cause of that accident.

Easy ...
 

... If they think it is uneconomical for them to develop a fix and offer further support for that type, they should buy the remaining airworthy airframes back.