Originally Posted by
PLeblond
This is a safety issue and indicative of an overall safety culture of the crew and thereby the airline. It falls under the same umbrella as a restaurant where ‘if the dining room is dirty, I’d hate to see the state of the kitchen’.
A recent example is KL691 this week. Plane was swapped out for maintenance to another aircraft. It was discovered a few hours into the flight that the aircraft had the substitute aircraft also had an unresolved issue—a scheduled maintenance task that was listed as an acceptable deferred defect (ADD) nearing expiration. Despite the plane being airworthy, they tuned the plane around and brought it back to AMS. This tells me KL is serious about safety.
I would definitely report this to the airline and would assume they take it seriously and the crew be noted for this.
To be fair, they were more serious about the dollar... or should I say Euro. At nearly the halfway point, they
could have proceeded to the destination and not disrupted the customers (since it was a deferred item and not critical to completing that flight). The issue is they would have had to either 1) find and pay someone to do the maintenance for them, or 2) ferry it back empty resulting in higher costs to KLM.