Uninformed comment
This thread has attracted a lot of very uninformed comment from people who have clearly never flown an airliner or opened and closed a set of cowls on a large fan engine.
The first thing I have to say is a big "well done" to the crew, your actions resulted in a sucsesfull outcome in an unusual situation and in my view any critsisum of the crew is totaly unwarranted. ( more about the "walk around" inspection by the crew later).
It is by now clear that the engine cowls had been left unlatched and these large composite structures departed from the aircraft due to the airflow and it is likely that the departing cowl damaged part of the engine fuel system. ( if this was a CFM56 I would have speculated that the cowl had damaged the outputs from the HMU that use fuel pressure to control the turbine and rotor active clearance control. This was a V2500 so comment on the likelyhood of this requires comment from someone who knows the V2500).
No doubt the BA engineering management are looking to hang someone for this maintenance error but it is likely that the root of this error is he fact that BA maintainence has been understaffed for some time and dispite finally belatedly realizing this it takes three years to get new maintenance staff online and a lot longer to get them to be 100% effective, so BA maintenance is well behind the drag curve on recruitment and manning levels. I am going to speculate that undermanning and the extra pressure of work put on those staff is at the root of this maintenance error ?
Could this mantanence error been picked up on the flight crews "walk around" inspection ? To this I have to say a very big YES !!!
At one time I had a nine inch flat blade screwdriver and one of the used of this was to check engine cowl security ( the other was to check the fuel dip sticks). I like all pilots are prohibited from having this tool as in this age of security paranoia I am not trusted as captain of the aircraft to carry such a dangerous weapon. If the guy doing the walk around inspection had access to a screwdriver he might have picked up the maintenance error but without such a tool there is no chance to do so.
So here we might well have the first clear link between the oppressive security culture and its adverse effect on flight safety.
The AAIB will no doubt investigate all of this bit just like the departure of the windshield from the BA BAe 1-11 twenty years or so back it is likely to be largely a human factors investigation.