Talking of towing, there was once a push to improve engineer's R/T in order to speed things up a bit at EGLL. I seem to recall that this was one of Michael Bishop's gripes with operations at Heathrow, and he suggested tuition for them, citing slow or non-existent readbacks, and misunderstood instructions as a cause of delay.
Would it have made a difference, and did anything ever change? I seem to recall their R/T was clunky, and must have made things interesting if they were crossing an active runway with stuff on short-ish finals. Did they have to hold an R/T license?
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