chapotraphouse

Unironically. "Bro why are you having me check the paintwork to make sure the engine and airbags work?"

I mean, yeah. You'd be surprised how much gets missed. more things are missed than are caught, and it virtually never leads to something that could cause a serious problem. That's because pre-flight inspection is way less useful than you'd think, because most of the important stuff kinda can't be inspected without major teardowns. Only a handful of the tens of thousands of incidents in aviation history have anything to do with something that could have conceivably fallen under a pre-flight inspection. All of them have been things unnoticed on the plane and affected stuff below the plane that a small hunk of plane landed on.

That's not to say that we should eliminate inspections, just the opposite. Planes should be torn down and refitted way more often than they are. Probably the 100-hour inspections should actually be much more in-depth and most of the content of a 100-hour inspection should be part of a pre-flight inspection. Deferred maintenance should be a lot less permissible than it is on anything that isn't just skin-layer cosmetic or aerodynamic.

Yep! A lot of the surface panels on planes take a surprising amount of damage. As it turns out air moving really fast causes lots of friction, sort of like a sandblaster or power washer. Also, lots of the panels on modern planes are made of composites (like plastics, but fancier) so these panels need to be regularly replaced over time. Damage is often covered up with Speed tape to provide a smooth surface which is resistant to UV light, heat, and air damage. That's the "$400 duct tape" you see on planes, but it's actually self-adhesive aluminum tape (also it's like maybe $30 per roll, no idea where the $400 rumour started. Maybe a weird third party amazon listing that went viral or something?)