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My next door neighbor is an engineer who works for the FAA. He worked for Boeing to begin with and there is nothing that gives him more joy than making them jump through hoops. I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't have some role in the AD you have cited. Of course it affects urethane foam that has become less fire retardant over time and has nothing to do with the 787.

We own a small airplane as well and often ADs are almost completely nonsensical. The manufacturers used to fight the stupid ones, but not these days. We had one issued a year or so ago because they found that two planes in the 1970s had some lock washers or something installed “backwards” during manufacture. Forgive my ignorance on the details. There were no incidents resulting from the “problem”. The FAA ordered nearly every other airplane from that manufacturer over a 20 year period disassembled and inspected.

Never mind that pulling apart assemblies that have been working fine for over 40 years was difficult, expensive and resulted in the destruction of equipment that were presented only a theoretical safety problem... something akin to preventing global warming. The aviation community has gotten quite used to government over regulation mostly by bureaucrats that appear to be working mostly to preserve their own job security.

The effect has been to stimey true progress on general aviation airplanes for decades. The 40 year old engine in our airplane is almost identical to the engines put in airplanes today, and it was 30 year old technology when it was manufactured. The only bright spot is "experimental aircraft" where tinkerers are still allowed to fly their own creations, but even good ideas from that area are generally not allowed to make there way into general use.