BA 787 Nosewheel collapse @ LHR

[Tom Sawyer]

Firstly, we have to do a lot with Crew onboard when you are part of a system trying maintain an operation as well as the aircraft. Try turning an A380 on a 90-120 min turn round. The outbound crew are usually on the flight deck by the time I have done my external checks so anything that needs testing will get tested with Flight Deck, Cabin Crew, red caps, cleaners, caterers and even pax all onboard. If I need the Captain or FO to move, I'll ask. I'll gauge what other options I need to consider based on the test I'm running. In this case, assuming the pin was fitted and all other conditions met, I wouldn't have a problem with crew onboard, but would advise them what I was doing, and most of the time the crew are actually interested to see what we do and what the test does. If you want to avoid this situation, then aircraft will need say a scheduled 4 hour turn round time just in case we need to run tests - good luck getting that implemented by an airline. That is the system we work in.

Secondly, I don't think the Engineers were expecting an outcome like this, so why wouldn't they let the crew do their pre-flights as per usual. If the pin was fitted in the wrong hole, they were not aware and carried on potentially "knowing" that they had seen a pin or flag in the NLG & MLG, or had asked one of the engineering team to put the pins in and got confirmation. If we presume the WOW eCB was tripped and collared as per the test procedure mentioned, why would they expect this outcome? So it comes down to holes in the cheese lining up - a design issue which led to a mistake made, and maybe in addition not following the procedure (I'm not 787 licensed but I do work on them occasionally so know it is far from perfect and just plain weird at times, so not sure of the BITE process for satisfaction of pre-conditions prior to the test running i.e, does the WOW eCB need to be tripped to allow the test to continue?).

Note - paragraph 2 assumes this incident is due to the discussed issue of being able to put the locking pin in the apex pin and not the correct locking point.