Respectfully Steve, if you’ve flown dozens of times in that aircraft over the last 20 years, that likely means most of those flights were likely not in the last year.
Everyone could, and I would hope should always feel safe in any aircraft. Sadly, we know only too well that quite often the feelings of unsafe only come moments after people realise that their lives depend (or are in some cases sadly limited to) the next few seconds.
All too often we see those ‘next few seconds’ come days/weeks/years after someone else botched, or even worse skipped something they should have done properly.
I have no doubt the pilots and crew never had unsafe feelings while flying that aircraft right up until a few moments after they realised they had a reason to feel unsafe, and by them it was too late. Who knows, had proper checks and maintenance been undertaken those same pilots and crew might still be flying today, and still not feeling at all unsafe.
Because it would be all but impossible to handle a single stencil that large! Painting masks are always arranged out of manageable sized pieces assembled into the pattern on the object. Consider the money and effort wasted if a single large sencil is stretched out of proportion or torn in application and the whole thing needs to be scrapped and cut again.
This is the first large case of a ‘typographical’ error on an aircraft witnessed in a long time, clearly the existing systems work in nearly every case.
Suppose you as an English speaker/reader worked in the aircraft engineering field.
Now you would likely perform engineering to an exceptional standard.
Now suppose you worked in decoration and were asked for example to apply the Arabic writing to an Emirates, Qatar or Etihad aircraft, or the Chinese characters to a Chinese airline or any other aircraft requiring words from a language you don’t speak, let alone read or write... The likelyhood of you making what seems an ‘obvious’ error to someone who does read those words is massively increased.
The other thing you need to understand is that a word written in any language in a four foot tall font does not look even look like that word when you are one foot away. Couple that with the fact that you’re actually looking at the word in the form of parts of a character spanned across multiple pieces of a stencil and you’ll certainly not notice the error.
Correct, it's the same where I work, so much money gets wasted on a project 'because it's what the customer wants' and so often I have to look at it and say 'yes, but do we get any return on this?' and invariably the answer is no, so I tell the customer to go elsewhere.
