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You would see planes literally taken apart and rebuilt. You would see key structural parts X-rayed. You would see many components replaced even BEFORE they showed signs of wear. There is no such thing as an old airliner. The oldest DC-3 now in scheduled service actually is the equivalent of a car with only 40,000 miles on its speedometer.
Suppose your car was a modern airliner, and you decided to maintain it as the airlines maintain their aircraft. You'd need three full-time mechanics. You'd inspect the car before every drive--even to the shopping center around the corner. You'd replace all four tires every 500 miles. You'd tune the engine every 2,500 miles. Every 10,000 miles you'd disassemble most of the engine, change brake linings and take the transmission apart, looking for any sign of wear. At 25,000 miles you'd install a completely new engine.
It costs an airline $50,000 for a major jet overhaul--which is more than the cost of a new transport plane only three decades ago. Our scheduled carriers are spending $1.5 million a day on maintenance, and one third of their work force is concerned with the care and feeding of airliners. The overhaul time of just a single jet engine is 15 days, requiring 10 mechanics to disassemble the engine and 15 to put it back together. For every hour of flight, a commercial transport plane receives five man-hours of maintenance.
Still worried about something going wrong with an airplane? I repeat: safety is the art of reducing risk to the least possible chance of occurence.
Are you afraid of mid-air collisions? We wouldn't blame you after reading or hearing all the talk about our crowded skies and the collision menace. But let's be logical about this, too. The airlines operate 8,000 flights a day. In any given year, there are more than 30 million takeoffs and landings at airports