Remember, the intent of
the regs with respect to maintenance is flight safety, not creating a
"gotcha" situation.

As an A&P, I believe this is absolutely not true. The regs actually
make it more difficult to do proper and safe maintenance, and easier to
do a shoddy but approved job. The intent of the regs is exactly to
create a "gotcha" situation so as to empower an FAA inspector to ground
any aircraft at will. The sooner you understand that, the easier it
will be to figure out what does and doesn't make sense.

I would hazard a guess that if some anal retentive FAA examiner wanted to,
he/she could find at least one maintenance violation in just about any
privately owned airplane that is more than a few years old.

Any airplane that is out of warranty - period. Only reason for the
warranty exception is that the factory might fight him on it if the
factory is responsible for the repair, and there's some money and clout
there. They can bring in people to overrule him. You can't.

I've seen it happen. I've seen airplanes grounded for illegible
(supposedly) TSO tags on seatbelts and placards curled up at the
corner, and the pilots written up for flying those supposedly
unairworthy airplanes. The rules are the way they are so feds can do
that. Safety doesn't enter into it.

Michael