Gerry557 wrote:Lots of aircraft fly with issues, it's rare to get one that would be classed fully serviceable but you never see that side of things.
Fortunately most systems have built in redundancy.
It sounds like there were possibe issues that might be related to this event that can be relooked at with the benefit of hindsight and with the knowledge from the door being found.
It's difficult to spot things on the ground if you can't reproduce the fault. It might have been compounded by different maintenance teams not knowing of previous issues.
Agreed, I take your point about how faults can be hard to spot on the ground, because pressurisation issues only happen in the air. You might say the same about the dreaded front end shakes on a fast car or motorbike, that's only detectable when it's doing an indecent speed. But they sure as hell take those issues seriously, because they daren't do anything else in case they have a dead customer. (Reminds me of a friend who had that very experience on a new Superbike. His bike shop had to buy the bike in, because although it could hire Thruxton for a road test, it couldn't find an engineer who was prepared to get on it and test its limits above 120 mph
)
But I digress. Yes, there are many possible causes for an emergency pressurisation light, including software errors (not that those have ever happened on a 737 Max...
) What makes this one different is that, with hindsight, its alarm diagnosis appears to have been right on the money! But the maintenance
still hadn't been done by the time the panel failed. That's no way to run a machine that's in charge of 177 lives.
Finally, of course, it seems relevant that this particular plane was fresh out of the factory and had (allegedly) only clocked up 150 hours....
BJ