[snakeyjake]

Civil aviation does not have the same inspection process that the military does.

The old heavy tankers were all being flown at their limits for decades with nothing more than a dude with a flashlight looking at the insides of them and going "yurp, this is good to go!"

On Air Force aircraft, to include the B-52, thousands of inspectors either look at every single critical part on a regular basis or use random sampling to establish estimated fleet health levels.

https://www.airforce.com/careers/maintenance-and-repair/nond...

I'm willing to bet that each individual B-52 has more paperwork on it and more eyeballs that have seen x-rays and ultrasounds of it than every single aerial firefighting platform in the world combined.