I work for an FDA regulated company and I presume the handling of complaints is handled similarly. Cases like this fall into a weird regulatory case. If a probl

I work for an FDA regulated company and I presume the handling of complaints is handled similarly. Cases like this fall into a weird regulatory case. If a problem is identified by someone internal before it rises to a certain level of risk, it's treated as "no harm no foul". But if the same thing is reported from someone external, it triggers a mandatory investigation, audit, and possibly recall. I think the idea is that if it's not a significant enough risky event, and the only person to ever even identify it as a risk has detailed internal knowledge, it's not as big a potential hazard and possibly much worse potential consequences were addressed before they became a problem. But if someone not privy to the same level of internal knowledge notices it, it's maybe not still so insignificant that it was headed off without serious consequence. It would make sense in this case that the jump seat pilot mentioned it, and it was corrected early. Possibly if it hadn't been corrected that early, it could have still been caught and corrected differently. But instead, the FAA got a report from a third party, which normally suggests it was significant enough that an unrelated layman could notice and probably wasn't so insignificant.