What's all this about taking off in a densely populated area and remaining in it? That wasn't how it was. Another refresher needed from Ye Olde Pilot perhaps:
Originally Posted by Ye Olde Pilot
You can try to pass the buck as much as you like but the responsibility for this incident rests squarely on the captain and co-pilot. In this case it was unlatched cowlings but it could just as easily been something else. The incident was the result of a poor walkaround.
I question the logic of flying the track below instead of diverting over less densely populated area to Stansted.
I see that ground crew are facing the blame.
It is now believed two engineers, one of them a supervisor, have been suspended while an investigation is carried out.
When the sh|t hit the fans the aircraft was 14 miles west of Charing Cross and heading away from London. From the moment it left the runway heading west it was over a sparsely populated area not a densely populated one. It then flew round London outside the M25 over open country (M25 wasn't built through conurbations and hasn't spawned that many yet!) until it was decided to go back to Heathrow.
As Airbanda says perhaps the emergency situation wasn't realised until they were back over East/Central London and track distances to Heathrow versus Stansted then made it no contest. We'll no doubt learn the full story when the full report comes out on that.
So back to lessons to be learned - yes BA maintenance clearly have a chequered history when you go digging for dirt but no maintenance company gets applauded for getting it right I guess. BA maintenance have for years had a very large and varied fleet to maintain and no doubt many other operations have learned from BA mistakes. You can find Investigation reports on many types where unsecured latches have been missed on walkarounds in all sorts of operations, not just Airbus and BA. That's why unsecured latches is something the lowliest student PPL has drummed into them as a BAD THING all round the world! Engineers no longer do walkarounds at Heathrow - but the sad thing is that it seems that due to time pressures no-one else seems to do them particularly effectively either - anywhere perhaps.
Instead we now learn of some kind of "risk balance" regime from NigelOnDraft. Is he really saying that it is down to the gut feeling of individual pilots on the day whether they feel lucky/comfortable? I am not sure that a commercial pilot is an expert in probabilities any more than a derivatives trader and I believe some are now the other anyway!
The likelihood of two engines both failing simultaneously is designed to be so low as to mean we have had 2 engine EROPs for well over 20 years, but contrary to what you might be tempted to believe when installed on the flightdeck you are not flying in a neatly designed world. You are of course flying in a real world within an environment that tests human design mercilessly on every flight. What we may have neatly skipped in our walk-around the argument is that it has always been known that if the same external/environmental cause affects both engines (didn't BA38 get us thinking?) then you end up stuffed just the once and that's enough.
I take NoD's point that it is perhaps an argument for introducing more mitigation or capture traps, and I wonder if that might for example mean that no work shall ever be carried out on both engines by the same engineer in the same session even to the point of checking oil levels.
That talk of who cops the delay code is a bit worrying, so is gatbusdriver's blind trust in everyone else on the ramp who apparently warrants the label "professional" just because they are there! That's bloody scarey actually. Do you ever fraternise with ramp agents and de-ice crews gatbusdriver? Many may be well meaning boys and girls but they ain't professionals. They get a bit of training in this and that and bits of paper may swap hands but do you realise what you are saying?