Do airliners have buttons for canned PAs?

[AnthonyGA]

This article implies that there is some sort of button on the flight deck that plays a recorded emergency message:

British Airways warns fliers their 747 is about to crash ... by mistake ? USATODAY.com

Is there really such a thing? How does it work?

[Sir Herbert Gussett]

There are no buttons in the cockpit for such thing that I have ever heard of though there are in the front galley on a few aircraft operated by airlines which can afford such a luxury.

[PEOPLESX]

Some airliners are equipped with those kind of systems (included as a subsystem). They can be activated in the cabin or cockpit with a certain knob and initiates a automatic evacuation/emergency procedure, depending on the airlines preferences (also possible, that the system is set permanent inop an the procedures are performed by the cabin attendants only).

Overhead-panel of an A340, left side in the middle area:
Photos: Airbus A340-541 Aircraft Pictures | Airliners.net

[+TSRA]

Yes there are, and they work a lot like selecting a pre-selected radio station in your car.

Depending on the system, you may select 1 for the taxi brief, 2 for the take-off, 3 for after take-off, so on and so forth

In other cases its select 1 for normal announcements, 2 for routine announcements (turbulence, etc) and 3 for emergencies, with a graphical list of the announcements within that category.

I some cases you can also select the language or in most cases the languages are simply played one after the other for the selection made.

[AnthonyGA]

So such systems exist, but not on the flight deck?

If so, I guess that could explain how a passenger or FA might trigger the wrong announcement. It's hard to see how a pilot could do so, and even harder to see how a passenger or FA could trigger such an announcement if the controls are on the flight deck.

So I guess this article got a lot of things wrong, which is not surprising. It would be interesting to find out exactly what did happen.

[marlowe]

Well its easy to see what happened the crew member cued up the wrong P/A, simple as that! It happens, wheres the fun if you cant all line up to do the safety demo only to hear the voice telling everyone to prepare for a ditching!

[Bullethead]

When the airline I fly for first got their B747-400s there were several instances of the depressurisation PA going off all by itself, the BA incident may have had a similar cause i.e. no crew input.

Regards,
BH.