“The airborne task sets the risk, not the work order,” he said. A job logged as maintenance and paint may also involve re-rigging a flap or replacing a stall vane—work that changes what the aircraft will do near the stall.

Ransbury identified three threats that can slip past an operator before a post-maintenance flight. The work may go below the radar because maintenance reads as routine, so the return-to-service plan never gets built. Schedule pressure follows. “You need to measure the process, not the speed,” he said. The third is the assumption that normal-operations qualification proves competence for every maneuver.

The qualification gap drew his sharpest framing: “Qualified for the line does not always equal qualified for the test.” Ransbury divided post-maintenance flying into confidence flights, functional check flights, and test flights, noting only the first is typically within a line crew’s scope.

He urged operators to name an owner for each return-to-service decision and to brief stop criteria so every crewmember knows how to halt a check. “It’s not an argument about rank,” he said.