Reading the actual NTSB report [1], my first reaction is just my usual awe at the professionalism of the NTSB. They started with a 3000-ft-long debris field and in the end could say "here are the microscopic stress fractures in the left pylon aft mount bulkhead's wing clevis spherical bearing assembly's ball element's forward bearing race".

[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Documents/DCA26MA024%20I...

The headline is missing an important bit.

Boeing knew of the flaw, and sent a letter to airlines about it. In 2011.

Some are forgetting how risk in technology works: No technology is designed or operated without flaws; that's an absurd approach and impossible to implement.

To reduce negative outcomes, we use risk management: assessing the likely lifetime cost of the flaw, and taking cost-effective measures to reduce the risk to an acceptable level. As a familiar example, redundant mass storage drives are much more cost-effective than high-reliability mass storage drives.

I recall a lot of fingerpointing minutes after the crash by people blaming the presumably foreign maintenance crew.

Even now there is a lot of uncertainty around this crash, maintenance - or lack thereof - or even wrong maintenance could still be a factor. But given the location of the part asking for a 'visual inspection' is a pretty strange move, the part is all but inaccessible when it is in its normal position and even with an endoscope it would be pretty hard to determine whether or not the part had weakened. That's just not going to show up visually until it is way too late unless the part has been especially prepared to announce the presence of hairline cracks.

You'd have to disassemble a good chunk of the wing to gain access to the part based on the pictures I've seen of how it all holds together when assembled.

One thing that worries me about the current political climate is that everything can be politicized. Do we know that behind the scenes Boeing wasn't paying a bribe for better treatment in the report? Or do we know that this report is especially damning because they refused to bribe? I guess we never knew for sure but the level of corruption now is so high I just have no faith that there hasn't been meddling in these investigations. It's the pernicious effect of corruption in a society and I don't think we're ready for it.

I’m guessing that manufacturers know of lots of flaws in the parts they make.

I wonder on what basis Boeing thought that damage to a load-bearing part could be safely ignored? I hope it wasn't "nothing bad has happened for 50+ years, so it's unlikely to happen now"?

Alternative to paywall: https://archive.ph/8xF1w

Whenever I see these I think of Fight Club

Isn't it a mostly Boeing project that is going to go around the moon next month? I'm really afraid for that crew.

Every five years feels too infrequent. These are planes that are 30 years old and have done 100,000 hours of flying. Apparently UPS policy is to keep them around for about 35 years to maximize the ROI. But maybe once they hit a particular age they need to be inspected deeply every few months.

I am not an expert, however. Can metal fatigue be detected with such infrequent inspection?

This is the problem with regulatory capture (corruption), "self-regulation", and billionaire bootlicking bozos who shoot their mouths off about "red tape" and "big gubberment".

The part was redesigned without the groove but wasn't mandated because Boeing said even the old part could be used, which is insane. Clearly, the new part wasn't installed and likely 1-2 inspections failed to notice it was broken.

Insane that we can have places like the skunk works create the sr71 and operate on shoe string budgets but the largest passenger plane company in the world can’t accurately assess risk on planes far under the former planes Mach 3 record