Interestingly enough, I flew for my last company for 19 very successful years. The SOP was that the captain ALWAYS did the external and there was many a night that I froze my balls off doing walk rounds whilst the F/O was nicely tucked up in a warm cockpit.
Funnily enough, for the previous 25 years I had had the benefit of a stalwart flight engineer who normally looked after this inspection for me but now that he wasn't there any more, it seemed reasonable to adopt this responsibility and to do it myself. Most of the time I found very little wrong but on occasion, I found cowlings not done up properly.
Certainly, if I had been flying an aircraft that already had 34 reported occasions of getting airborne with unlocked cowlings then I can absolutely assure you that this item would have been very high in my hit list - EVEN IF IT MEANT GETTING MY KNEES WET IN THE PROCESS.
This whole episode smacks of complacency.
Who comes out of it well?
I simply cannot believe that pilots on a multi-crew flight deck are still shutting engines down without involving the other pilot. It is simply incredible.
As to not having been allowed to use manual thrust for years and years. That is a fantastic concept to me.
The whole thing was a bloody shambles.
They were very lucky.
From an operational point of view they managed to close both runways at Heathrow and that must have impressed the rest of the aviation world who were trying to land at the time including their own brethern.
In fact, it makes me wonder about the BA habit of "committing" to Heathrow on the basis that it has two runways when one of their own tribe can shut the whole place down in minutes.
Am I alone or can someone out there tell me that they actually did well?