> This sounds like a case of Schrödinger's documentation: it may or may not exist. I think Boeing is still looking for it and doesn't want to admit they don't have it until they're absolutely, positively certain they don't.

I can imagine that for each plane could exist millions of documents, hidden away on different servers. Best-case scenario they could claim that a subcontractor was order to create it and lost it.

From experience I saw a company where people would have single copies of documents stored on hard drives, personal cloud drives, memory sticks, etc. They were always able to find what they needed, but there were a few close calls.

This is where being under so much pressure to produce the documentation, somebody ends up magic-ing it into existence. I wonder if they even have a chain of custody that would highlight that forms, etc, were retroactively created?

I am an investigative reporter, and I take the same approach toward public records. If it ever existed in digital form, there is almost always a stray copy somewhere — regardless of the agency’s records retention schedule. The challenge is figuring out where it is.

Just to point out that, despite the natural state of documentation being a superposition of "exists" and "doesn't exist", for that specific one there is a relative short (hundreds of pages) manual that says in no misleading terms exactly where the documents must be.