Agreed.
This is what Mike and I have been discussing about the reasoning behind the latest AC revision on the emergency slides. A simple wording can make a huge impact on operations and what not.
Mike and I are engineers. WE understand this stuff. IN our jobs, we spend 20% of our time designing stuff, and 80% of our time documenting stuff. So we learn how to carefully craft our documents so that less chances of lawsuits could be created.
Since the FAA is a policy maker, they are the ones who have to be carefully choosing their words. By reading the revised AC, I quickly can tell that they know that the entire aviation industry is violating the policy, and FAA did nothing about it for 15 plus years. So it's a way of FAA trying to cover their azz, and have no choice but to pass Baltia while the other certified airliners are flying with the issue.
This isn't really the first time it's happened. I've told everybody about the time I work on the 787 Dreamliner and how it came across the battery problem that grounded all 787 flying in the United States for 3 months in 2013. Luckily at the time there was only 52 aircrafts in the customer's hands, and the customers were pissed at Boeing and FAA. So Boeing spend billions of dollars to get this resolved and FAA was involved.
Months after this was said and done, news reports started coming out saying that for years, Boeing and FAA were in bed together, so FAA got lazy over time about trusting Boeing to let anything fly. FAA realize there was a lot of truth to it.
So when Boeing is going to work on the 777x next year, FAA will not be too soft on them.
I personally believe that Baltia will get the pass. It goes back to carefully crafting the words to tell Baltia that they passed. They have 7 cases to make it into one report. Because of FAA's old AC, it has caused FAA to make a mess out of the whole thing.
But 15 weeks is too long for this stupid mess. It's time, FAA, to let Baltia move forward.
AI
