Airplane manufacturer Piper Aircraft Inc. issued a mandatory service bulletin grounding 76 new aircrafts manufactured during the first five months of the year. Thirty-nine of the airplanes were in customers' hands, and the rest were at dealers or at the Piper factory. The bulletin was issued after a production-line worker noted a bent seatbelt bracket in a new airplane. The defective bracket had been fabricated of high-strength steel that should have been very difficult to bend. An investigation revealed that the steel was insufficiently strong. Piper traced the steel to a particular order and determined that a large number of other aircraft parts requiring the use of high-strength steel were manufactured from the same batch of steel. This signaled a flight-safety issue resulting in the grounding order and meant that Piper must locate, remove, and replace all the affected parts in all the airplanes. Grounding a fleet of airplanes is a costly move. Piper had to absorb the cost of repairs, many of which were very difficult and, therefore, expensive. In addition, with half the airplanes scattered all over the globe, the manufacturer endured significant travel costs just getting to the planes. On the other hand, owners of the airplanes