Originally Posted by Herb687

And hardly unique to AA. For those of us who fly planes, throw out all that crap they taught us in ground school about the four forces of flight. It's not lift and thrust overcoming drag and gravity that makes airplanes fly.

Two things are needed to make airplanes fly: MONEY and PAPERWORK.

Not too long ago UA changed its maintenance documentation procedures and was requiring line maintenance mechanics to photograph their work and e-mail the photos to Maintenance Control before anything would be signed off. This created a huge number of maintenance delay minutes. Maintenance delays due not to actual maintenance but rather time wasted waiting for signoffs and log entries.

For the poster that suggested that there should be a spare 1 lb. iPad mounting bracket carried on board every AA aircraft and the challenger that used the "slippery slope" argument to say that this would be taken to the extreme and mean carrying one spare of everything on board - you are both wrong! Smart operators track and know which components on an airplane are high-failure items and which ones (practically) never break. Spare parts inventory should be stocked (and positioned) accordingly - plenty of inventory of components that fail regularly and no need to waste money by stocking up on stuff that rarely breaks.

As to whether or not AA counts as a smart operator, let the debate begin!