...the report does go on to criticize the actions of the Captain during the evacuation, which doesn't make for good reading either for the Captain or BA's training system.
I thought the report had been out for a while, today’s piece is an update on the final.
Anyhow my internet is playing up so the following comments are based on what I remember reading a few months back, plus some of the comments above.
Firstly and most importantly how often have we been told in the sim or read accident reports ourselves and thought :
“if only they had engaged their brains for a few seconds before moving controls”....
yet here we are in the cold light of day follow a nasty and the investigators and some commentators are running a stopwatch and commenting on timing....
As I recall it the abandon in question happened at fairly high speed. In the time between the fire bell sounding/fire eng EICAS message appearing and the fuel control switch being moved as the third action item of the “Fire Engine ....Checklist” the following had to be done:
The emergency had to be recognised and appropriate action recognised.
The abandon initiated and completed in an orderly manner,
The nature of the malfunction confirmed once stopped,
A decision made as to which checklist(s) to action, that command verbalised.....etc etc
I suspect you get my drift....quantifying the delay in terms of gallons of avtur spilt is interesting but as we know the process is a bit more involved than: fire bell/slam brakes on/ whack a fuel control switch to cutoff...
As has been said the flight crew got no info from ATC as to the seriousness of the fire. As I recall it and as I heard it elsewhere the captain only found out how bad things were when the relief First Officer went back into the cabin, saw the situation and either contacted the flight deck by inter phone or returned to the flight deck to pass the message directly. Can anyone confirm or correct that?
As for the evac checklist - it is a “fair cop” that for whatever reason it wasn’t actioned in a text book manner ( I think at the time of this accident it was a recall checklist, with a Boeing version on the yoke as a back up, and the BA version on the back of the paper QRH/in the ECL.)
Nevertheless the evac was successful....
The team here will however be pleased to know that the evac checklist BA use on it’s T7s have been completely rewritten as a result of this accident. It now it is very definitely a very prescriptive “read and do” involving both operating pilots..and because of that I suspect any stopwatch watchers still won’t be happy if we get around to forensic analysis of a future evacuation of a BA T7.