…that’s an indication that something is amiss somewhere.
The natural law of momentum of very large bodies holds: they do not change their behavior abruptly. And as the change in behavior occurs, the accelerated growth in wreckage piling up by the wayside becomes more and more noticeable.
So, either the auditing effort (conducted by a much, much smaller body) has been slipshod over a substantial number of years or the nature of the auditing has itself suddenly changed, perhaps acquiescing to factors that render its results invalid.
The situation aviation finds itself now is clearly evidence of the latter, as an accelerating number of airplanes simply haven’t been falling out of the sky due to design or manufacturing defects. Quite the contrary. The oft-told fable of McDonnell Douglas coming in and overnight corrupting Boeing’s entire management, administrative, engineering, manufacturing and support services employees, about 150,000 of them, is just that, a fable. That it became embedded in popular culture is understandable when the populace (which includes many of Boeing’s employees) doesn’t have the wherewithal to recognize the fallacy of such abrupt change or notice that there isn’t an accelerating or even linear growth of the pile of wreckage and so accepts the unprofessional reporting as “news.” But the fable’s blind acceptance by some professional and analytical bodies within the industry casts doubt on the competence of those bodies.
It was only a matter of time before an accident resulted in a similarly sensational “investigation” by the news media which relied on those fabled facts as the basis for rampant speculation that falsely pinned the cause on the design, which Congress incompetently and irresponsibly swallowed hook, line and sinker, and then arrogantly demanded a fix. That led the FAA to make a hasty commitment to “100% oversight” of all design and manufacturing operations at the company, which in theory requires one FAA agent for every Boeing employee involved in the design or manufacture of an airplane, watching their every move, getting in the way, adding to the process documentation and guaranteed to introduce far more deficiencies than it prevents.
Predictably, after a few years, when a door improperly installed while under 100% oversight blew out during climb, instead of the aim of 100% oversight being deemed stupid, it was deemed not yet achieved due to inadequate staffing and since that couldn’t be resolved in short order, operations at Boeing were throttled to enable 100% oversight.
The decision to throttle operations was aided by the failure of the NTSB to show any sign of identifying the root cause within a reasonable timeframe. The NTSB knows on which side its bread is buttered and chose to pursue Congress’ prejudice of the cause rather than follow its long established, reasonable and proven investigative process. As a result, seven months after the door blew out they were publicly complaining to Congress that Boeing was not being cooperative in furnishing paperwork that a month later—after a public hearing—they admitted didn’t exist. The nonexistence was known to the public less than three weeks after the blowout.
Ludicrous? Yes, but it’s the ludicrous reality that we hang our hats on when we board an airplane: Safety, in spite of the regulators, the lawmakers, the investigators and above all, the news fabricators (some of them—pilots!)