The Friday Harbour Seaplanes Otter dove into Puget Sound off Whidbey Island and all 10 people aboard were killed. On Oct. 24, the NTSB urged all Otter operators to ground their planes until the parts were inspected. It followed up a few days later urging the FAA to mandate the inspections. Under the order, Otters don’t have to be grounded but they do have to be inspected by Dec. 19 and the results reported to the FAA.
What did Canada mandate, being the country of design authority?
Didn’t TC owner Viking Aviation issue a bulletin, perhaps even call operators?
I think at Pacific Western Airlines we’d have inspected horizontal stabilizer structure and controls after reports the aircraft dove into the water, and again when NTSB revealed what it found in the wreckage.
And any operator should especially inspect any Otter that was maintained or overhauled by the same people as the accident aircraft.
Long shots but preventing such accidents is essential.
Reading “the mandate comes after the NTSB publicly pressured the agency to act on its preliminary findings on the possible cause of the crash of an Otter in Washington State on Sept. 4” tells me that FAA is an administrative mess and in dire need of a house cleaning.
House cleaning may or may not help. You go from a group of experienced people who are reluctant to do their jobs, to a group of new people who don’t know how to do their new jobs.
NTSB and FAA are two different agencies, with overlapping but different charters & objectives. NTSB is always immediately “pressuring to act” because their charter doesn’t task them with considering any factors other than the perceived or suspected danger.
As an example, the military typically institutes an immediate “stand down” in instant response to an accident, grounding the type worldwide even though they may yet have no clue what caused the accident. You can’t do that in the civilian world, although NTSB as an agency would doubtless love the policy.