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"Someone trusted you with their lives, and you let them down," he says. "You just hope that they find it was something that couldn't be helped, something beyond anyone's control." Statistics don't bear out that hope. Most often, it's the pilot's fault. Less often, a mechanical failure.

At this early stage, it appears that mechanical trouble reported by the pilots contributed to the crash of Alaska Airlines flight 261. Industry insiders agree that the airline has always run a responsible company, not some sleazy little cut-rate upstart.

But even the top-flight airlines, the "majors," as they're called in the trade, don't have perfect maintenance records. Keeping aging jets airworthy is an expensive and time-consuming job, one that glides in and out of gray areas. And given that the airlines are motivated mostly by profits, it's always been surprising to me how much leeway they get from the Federal Aviation Administration on maintenance issues.

Commercial jets are complex machines with up to 100 different systems. Each system (fuel, controls, engine, pressurization) can have hundreds of parts. Mechanics, hired and trained by the airlines, tend to specialize in a particular system or set of systems.

A small airplane's engine is rebuilt and replaced after a certain number of flight hours. But the airlines gave that up long ago. Now they track the health of their machines using "condition monitoring." The engines are stuck full of probes, feeding data to other systems and the black box. That information on engine performance gets regularly uploaded into a huge database of other engines. If the engine in question still looks strong by comparison, the FAA allows the airline to let it ride. Some engines fly with only minor repairs for thousands of hours past the original recommended rebuild time.

It sounds like an efficient program -- why rebuild an engine that isn't going to fail? The engines are constantly tuned and upgraded with new parts as they need them. Airlines schedule regular "A, B, C and D" checks. The frequent "A" check is basically a one-day walk-around. The "D" (done every five or six years) is a complete tear-down and detailed inspection of all systems. The Alaska Airlines jet had a recent "C" check, one step below the in-depth "D."

But even with such obsessive and almost-constant scheduled maintenance, there's a problem: Cutting costs is the key to survival for struggling airlines. Half or more of an airline's expenses are fuel and labor costs. Fuel costs are fixed, which leaves labor to cut if profits are hurting. That means hiring lower-paid staff and streamlining procedures that take valuable time. If maintenance can be put off and engine life extended, that's a direct bottom-line boost.

"Negotiating on maintenance issues, sure," says one mechanic who has worked with a major airline. "Airlines are always writing a letter to show some data to some FAA guy to say that some engine doesn't need to be tested so often. Every [limit] gets changed."

Next page | Are complaints ignored until there's a crash?