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.
In isolation this would probably be a genuine mistake, human factor. There are however other factors here that need to come out and I hope they do. Then it should be very clear why this happened.
engineers forum:
at the end of the day its clear that the cowls were left unlatched ,one may have been a fault but two maybe not .
It will never come out that we are very short of the correct manpower ,we may have had a few new starters and a load of mechanics that are pushed onto the Licensed Engineers but we dont have enough experience people at the front end.
The Aircraft Maintenance Supervisors (introduced due to a previous incident) are a complete waste of time because all they do is chase ADDs and try to make themselves look good so that they can get an even bigger bonus, there are some AMSs that dont even know what the hell to do and this has been reported to quality with no help from them either.
I understand that these cowls have a second inspection or a verification check ,that means there may be two engineers on suspension and as it led to the aircraft and its passengers being in danger ,we know where that will lead .
Pressure of work ,not enough of the correct manpower and running the damn operation on continual overtime so that we have an overworked and tired engineer. nothing will be done about all this because we like overtime as it supplements our low pay ,yes low pay
but as i say nothing will be done about it , BA will say that things will be changed ,there will be more human factors things which do sod all apart from create a job for the instructors .......what we need for this is far more real engineers not bloody mechanics that dont know the front from the back and are put with the LAE because the teams do not want them .and we need to get rid of the self serving AMSs and replace them with the supervising LAE who is not TMG .
i
unless somthing is done it will get worse and one day things may not be so lucky........i like my job at BA at times but we seem to have lost our way in what we do and why ,why are we engineers .......