BA pilot activates emergency slide seconds before take-off in £50K blunder

[Airband]

BA pilot wrongly activates emergency slide seconds before take-off in £50K blunder

"This is beyond a rookie error. It’s totally baffling to understand"

Wed Feb 07, 2024 - The Evening Standard
by Josh Salisbury

A British Airways pilot has mistakenly activated the emergency slide at Heathrow Airport seconds before take-off.

The blunder delayed the flight to Romania on Saturday morning for several hours and cost the airline £50,000, reported The Sun newspaper.

Passengers, who were strapped in their seats when the mistake happened, were left waiting for several hours until another flight with a different pilot could be found.

Pictures published by the paper showed airport firefighters surrounding Gate 24E where flight BA886 was due to leave for Romania shortly before 10am.

The mistake allegedly occurred because the captain did not disarm the plane door on the Airbus A320 when he opened it to pass documents to ground crew. This would have stopped the emergency slide from being deployed.

A source told the paper: "The captain of all people would have known the safety rules around opening doors.

"This is beyond a rookie error. It’s totally baffling to understand."

The rescheduled flight eventually left at 1.15pm, more than three hours after the advertised time.

A BA spokesperson said: "We apologised to customers and arranged a replacement aircraft to ensure they were able to continue their journey."

The spokesperson added that the aircraft returned to service once an engineer certified it as safe to fly.

[Rich Pulman]

1) I can’t remember working for an airline where pilots were permitted to open the doors unless we weren’t carrying FAs or in the event of an emergency. We always got annual training on the doors, but they were ALWAYS the purview of the FAs;

2) “seconds before takeoff”??? How melodramatic!

Edited February 8 by Rich Pulman
Spilling

[conehead]

2 hours ago, Rich Pulman said:

1) I can’t remember working for an airline where pilots were permitted to open the doors unless we weren’t carrying FAs or in the event of an emergency. We always got annual training on the doors, but they were ALWAYS the preview of the FAs;

2) “seconds before takeoff”??? How melodramatic!

purview

noun 

the limit of someone's responsibility, interest, or activity:

[Rich Pulman]

2 hours ago, conehead said:

purview

noun 

the limit of someone's responsibility, interest, or activity:

Damn autocorrect. My spilling was purfect until that invention! Correction maid!

[Seeker]

13 hours ago, Airband said:

 

The mistake allegedly occurred because the captain did not disarm the plane door on the Airbus A320 when he opened it to pass documents to ground crew. This would have stopped the emergency slide from being deployed.

 

Why was the slide armed with the aircraft still parked at the gate?  This seems more like a FA error than a pilot error.

Rich is right - pilot's don't normally open doors but even if they do slides should not have been armed until the aircraft starts to push.

[Kip Powick]

Post deleted........Posting was totally in error

 

Sorry for those that might have thought the post was factual.

 

 

 

 

[Seeker]

Well, if it really was a steward/flight attendant on their first day on the job then it's a training issue!

[Airband]

Some additional info -

British Airways Pilot Mistakenly Opened Emergency Slide of A320 at London Heathrow

Wed Feb 07, 2024 - Aviation A2Z
by Mahesh Darkunde

LONDON- A British Airways (BA) Pilot [Captain] inadvertently activated an emergency evacuation slide on an Airbus A320 at London Heathrow Airport  on Saturday.  The incident occurred due to a baggage complication, which necessitated reopening the cabin door after the slide had already been armed.

Remarkably, this marks the fifth occurrence in just over a year where an emergency slide has been unintentionally deployed on a British Airways aircraft in peculiar situations.

This time, the 22-year-old aircraft had landed at Heathrow from Prague on Saturday morning and was getting ready for its subsequent flight, with numerous passengers attempting to stow their hand luggage in the overhead lockers.

Evidently, the available space in the overhead lockers became insufficient, leading the cabin crew to offload some baggage, potentially causing a delay.

To make up for lost time, the slides were armed immediately after closing the cabin door. Unexpectedly, ground staff knocked on the door, prompting the Captain to open it and inadvertently deploy the slide into the side of the airbridge.

The incident triggered a comprehensive response from emergency services at Heathrow, with passengers being evacuated from the plane using stairs positioned at the rear of the aircraft.

Fortunately, no injuries were reported; however, as expected, the aircraft had to undergo maintenance to replace the deployed slide.

Referred to as ‘inadvertent slide deployments’ in the aviation sector, such incidents are not unprecedented. The majority of these occurrences stem from cabin crew oversight in properly disarming the slide mechanism, followed by inadvertently opening the door during routine arrival procedures.

Similar Incidents

In a similar incident last month, a senior British Airways cabin crew member unintentionally activated the emergency slide on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner while the aircraft was still taxiing to the gate in Mumbai. This incident happened during a demonstration of door-opening procedures to a new-hire colleague.

In 2023, there were two instances where newly hired cabin crew members opened the emergency exit door immediately after arming the slide for separate flights. In a third incident, a crew member was supposed to disarm their door but instead opened the door, activating the slide.

British Airways has recently adopted the Japanese ritual of Shisa Kanko, which translates to ‘pointing and calling’ in English. This ritual involves cabin crew pointing at the door and verbally confirming whether the door is armed or disarmed before preparing it for departure or arrival.

The implementation of Shisa Kanko aims to enhance the focus of cabin crew on their tasks at hand.

[Kip Powick]

Post deleted......entirely bogus information 

 

 

[Airband]

4 hours ago, Kip Powick said:

This whole episode shows how the Press can screw up anything to do with aviation....

 Is it your position that it was not a pilot who opened the armed cabin door of the A320 aircraft scheduled to operate BA886 LHR-OTP on Sat 03 Feb/24?

[Kip Powick]

4 hours ago, Airband said:

 Is it your position that it was not a pilot who opened the armed cabin door of the A320 aircraft scheduled to operate BA886 LHR-OTP on Sat 03 Feb/24?

Assumption wrong ....Preface to remaining Post edited.

However ....Re pilot doing it......If door 1L was closed then I have to assume that the pilots were in the cockpit getting ready to pushback. I can think of absolutely no reason a pilot would get out of his seat and go to 1L and open it. If it was luggage or late paperwork, I am assuming that a FA would open the door.....With my experience I have never seen a pilot leave the cockpit and go back to retrieve any paperwork.... after the doors were closed........he/she would ask the FA to do it.

[Airband]

On 2/8/2024 at 5:28 PM, Kip Powick said:

My position is that different sources state that a different member of the crew opened the door.

What source suggests that a different crew member opened the door on the current flight being discussed (BA886 on Feb03/24) or that it was other than an A320. 

Your earlier reference refers to an event that took place in Jan/23

Edited February 10 by Airband

[Kip Powick]

You are soooo correct.... My apologies for posting year old data. 

Based on my personal experiemce, and bolstered by thinking my posted data was this recent episode  I assumed it was an FA.......WRONG.... I guess I should read more carefully 

Appreciate you took the time to correct me.

 

KP

 

[Airband]

We're good.

Might have finishing a quick trip to the lav prior to pushback, coupled with the FA's being deep in the cabin doing a final sweep, positioned the pilot to open the door, thinking, 'let's get this done and be gone', not realizing they had armed the door early?

[J.O.]

The fact that the aircraft was (apparently) still at the gate with at least one door armed is problematic for me. There's a reason why airline SOPs typically have the doors being armed at the start of pushback (or taxi if on a remote stand) - and this is it. I've had to investigate a few of them and the one thing they had in common was something outside the normal routine taking place - like a last minute bit of forgotten paperwork.

[Tango Foxtrot]

Must have been a slow day for news.

  Call maintenance,  they will install a new slide.  Keep going. 

 

[Junior]

This is a serious incident that can cause great injuries to the person outside. Happened at my company on a freighter with someone standing on the stairs truck. The normal procedure is that only the outside person opens the door after getting a visual signal that the pilot has disarmed the door, but for some out of the ordinary reason, the co-pilot opened the door. Fortunately, the way the stairs truck was aligned with the aircraft resulted in it somehow blocking the slide and the person on the stairs was not literally sent flying off of it.

The commenter in the news article who calls it baffling to understand is a person incapable of understanding simple things. People make significant errors sometimes, even on simple things like forgetting to disarm a door. These errors are frequently in situations where we have been made aware of the consequences of the hazards of an action for something that is a rarely encountered situation. At some later time this situation is encountered combined with a sense of time urgency.

In the case at my company, it was a frequently encountered situation for some pilots and less frequent for others(depending on how often a copilot was flying freighters).

For myself, I think a reminder to be a bit paranoid of opening and reminding yourself once in a rare while to never open one without stopping and thinking about it for a few seconds could be beneficial. You can literally kill someone.

As for the pilot never opening a door on a typical passenger flight, there are literally millions of these flights per year. I suspect it happens on rare occasion. Just because we have never seen it in such a flight doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, even on an airline like BA.

 

[FA@AC]

On 2/8/2024 at 9:29 AM, Seeker said:

Why was the slide armed with the aircraft still parked at the gate?  This seems more like a FA error than a pilot error.

Rich is right - pilot's don't normally open doors but even if they do slides should not have been armed until the aircraft starts to push.

It’s procedure at some airlines to arm doors as soon as the bridge/stairs are removed from the aircraft.