BA pilot enlists as cabin crew

[expediteoff]

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3055217/british-airways-passengers-pilot-safety-demo-plane-move-runway/

Multi tasking at its best?

[hoss183]

A comment from the sun page -
Daft story. Planes can and do take off without any pilot intervention - in theory all the pilots could have stood in the cabin as the plane took off, rather than taxied - that would have really freaked them out!
Not sure if thats sarcasm, or the poster read the Sun too much :)

[Mr Angry from Purley]

Was his name Nigella?

[360BakTrak]

If there weren't enough crew for the safety demo, were there enough crew in the event of an emergency?! :confused:

[Flocks]

I don t believe about it ! I m not long haul, but you need the right number of cabin crew to dispatch, so enough for the safety demo. And a friend of mine cc on longhaul told me the n1 Don t do the safety demo (maybe it is only in her airline with extra cc), so in that case you don't need the pilot, you have the n1 !
Furthermore, as pilot I have no idea how to do a safety demo, Don t think I can learn it in 10mn before the flight, and Don t want to do it. ...

[Herod]

:mad: As Flocks says, you need the right number of CC to despatch. Quite apart from that, who was:

a. keeping a lookout for the things the captain might not see

b. ready to take over should the captain be taken ill

c. operating the radio, copying clearances etc, or was the captain multi-tasking as well.

Probably intended as a prank, but I don't think BA management will be amused

[T250]

What an old fashioned term, 'enlists'. We're not in the 1930s, maybe apply or signs up for is more appropriate. :cool:

[DaveReidUK]

From the Sun:

Stunned flyer Jo Osborn tweeted British Airways from the Heathrow-bound flight: "Want me to do it so he can fly the plane?"

The captain on the long-haul flight from Houston, US, told passengers: "We’re short of crew today so the pilot is helping with the safety demo."

The drama on BA195 came as cabin crew continued a seven-day strike over poor pay.If that's representative of the standard of accuracy of the rest of the article, it's probably all :mad:

BA195 LHR-IAH (https://www.google.co.uk/#q=BA195&*)
(https://www.google.co.uk/#q=BA195&*)

[Max Angle]

Houston is a 3 crew flight so if true it would have been the heavy FO who helped out, don't think anyone would have contemplated single crew taxi.

[framer]

They either had the minimum legal number of cabin crew required or they didn't. Simple.
BA will know that within five minutes of hearing about it or more likely, they had already sanctioned the procedure of a first officer doing the exit brief prior to the duty.
They would have still had two pilots in the flight deck, the same as on shorter hops so no drama there. I imagine they had the minimum number of cabin crew required but are used to operating with more than the minimum number required.
The biggest risk ( small if managed well) is the distraction of operating in a manner/ sequence that is different to normal.
No big deal in my mind. The Industrial Relations side of things is a different story and I hope the cabin crew achieve improved conditions.

[wiggy]

As they say.." calm down, calm down."..framer pretty much has the answers in the previous post, and as I understand it what really happened was this:

1. It was the extra/ heavy /relief pilot who got involved in the briefing. There were always the minimum required two pilots on the flight deck for the taxi out.

2. There were more than the legal minimum number of cabin on board but less than the normal compliment required for this service in this particular cabin fit.

This I believe led to "visibility" issues in a cabin zone solely for the safety brief. There was a choice of using the relief pilot to make up the numbers in the cabin to make sure the brief was visible to all the passengers with a single run through or delay the departure and run the brief twice, moving cabin crew as required for visibility between the two briefs. The first option was the one taken.

3. So to sum up: absolutely no rules broken, simply a case of a professional crew using their flexibility to try and get a flight away on time.

.........However....Because of the media "outrage"/ S. Storm over this and associated generally uninformed comments ( and we might just have had some of them here, I'll let the team be the judge) if this situation arises again I rather expect the management will have already made it clear that do not want the Flight Crew getting involved; they will just be told for the sake of a quiet life run the brief twice using the cabin crew only and accept any delay, all quite possibly to the detriment and annoyance of the passengers......so well done, another victory for the likes of social media users such as the Sun's "Stunned flyer Jo Osborn" :mad:

Hope that helps, so there really is nothing to see here, etc......

[Porky Speedpig]

Spot on Wiggy! Some people just don't know when they are well off.

[Bergerie1]

What a storm in a tea cup. I am sure wiggy is absolutely right - a good common sense solution to a very minor problem. 'Terrified' - surely not! It does seem to me that upper lips are a lot less stiff these days.