It seems this captain may need a vision check as he failed to see the pitot covers
I’ve been trying to understand this, and all I can think is that what he saw wasn’t completely out of place - i.e. if there’d been a possum impaled on a probe, or a pink g-string hanging off it, it would’ve looked obviously wrong. But a probe cover on a probe isn’t something that we never see or that looks completely abnormal, so perhaps it just didn’t set off the right mental alarm bells. Not sure I can quite file it under ‘Mistakes I Could Never Conceivably Make Under Any Circumstances’.
The lack of an RTO is a bit harder to rationalise…