When you're in a specialized on-call role like this you know to expect the unexpected and I surmise they're excellently compensated for this level of knowledge and expertise on the playing field.
It's the same thing with some hospital support teams I've seen in the IT world -- it bewildered me that our EMR vendor wanted to ship someone out next day to drop a replacement hard drive in just because one of the discs that's been mirrored three times over has failed. We'd live with the remaining 3 copies of the same data a little bit longer, but they saw that as a possible safety risk.
It's vastly cheaper for them to helicopter in (figuratively, usually...) and replace a single drive when the stakes are minimal versus deal with cascading fallout of multi-drive failures and data/system recovery.
This level of support is common for most high-end hardware systems - all the big players do this, including IBM, Dell, etc.
If you've ever been involved in an NTSB failure report, you do NOT want to be the person answering the "so why was the replacement drive shipped by pack mule".
While it may not be pleasant, NTSB investigations are generally meant to be blameless, no? Punishment is considered the lowest priority, reserved for specific intentional violations.
It's the same thing with some hospital support teams I've seen in the IT world -- it bewildered me that our EMR vendor wanted to ship someone out next day to drop a replacement hard drive in just because one of the discs that's been mirrored three times over has failed. We'd live with the remaining 3 copies of the same data a little bit longer, but they saw that as a possible safety risk.