The Law and Maintenance: A Paper, presented at AIRMEC '81 in Zurich

Airplanes themselves seem to start up, take off, fly and land in much the same sort of way whether the people around are speaking English, American (—a totally different language—), French, German, Dutch, or what have you. But the Law in each of those countries and many others around the world can take a peculiarly different view of the same set of circumstances. If the maintenance is OK, and the thing goes up and comes down, the Law is unlikely to be too troubled by how it did it. The probability is that if maintenance done in one country causes an accident or contributes to an accident in another country, someone is going to have to put a thinking‐cap on and start looking into the whys and wherefores. For example, if you order your transportation in Spain and call for ‘burro’, you will get a donkey. Whereas if you order your transportation in Italy and call for ‘burro’, you will get butter—perhaps they will expect you to slide on it.