There’s an opinion among some pilots and mechanics that inspections and scheduled maintenance can do more harm than good. By constantly disassembling and reassembling an aircraft to inspect it, they argue, we’re prematurely wearing out the aircraft and actually making it less safe. Those same pilots and mechanics note that this is largely true, in their opinion, for aircraft that aren’t flown very much. For more active aircraft, however, they acknowledge that regular inspections and maintenance are less intrusive and, in fact, beneficial.
The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” crowd advocating for less-frequent inspections of infrequently flown aircraft have a lot of experience and information on their side. One of the problems, however, is where to draw the line—50 hours a year? 100?—along with the presumption that what one set of eyes deems okay during an inspection also will be approved by the next set. Most everyone agrees, however, that any inspection or maintenance procedures carry with them their own set of challenges and possibilities to get something wrong, something that might result in an accident. No one is advocating abandoning scheduled inspections. But it often does seem counterintuitive to basically disassemble for an inspection a perfectly good airplane that flew, say, 50 hours last year because the calendar says so.
