Weirdly enough British Airways (BA) is yet again on the receiving end of a public dressing down from the UK's regulatory authorities. This time the Air Accidents Investigation Branch is giving them a very hard time indeed over what it found when it dug down into BA's maintenance empire after
a medium-embarrassing incident with a 757 back in 2003.
That comes just a few weeks after the AAIB also jumped on an incident when a BA A319 crew shrugged off a
mid-air electronics failure with rather more
sang froid than the investigators felt was appropriate. And that was distressingly close to another report which also widened its remit from looking at a
panel loss on take-off to several other events that the investigators felt were looking alarmingly like a pattern.
Surprise was also expressed in the business (though not unanimously, and mostly in the USA) when a BA crew flew a loaded 747-400 from Los Angeles to the UK after suffering an engine failure shortly after take-off.
