ba287
 

Just saw BA287 going overhead on climb out and it looks like it lost a bit of cowling (or something) off its port side engine. appears to have drifted down on the breeze somewhere towards chertsey/addlestone direction. Did video it, but even on full zoom its only a faint black dot pixel size due to distance.

yup seems unphased!

BA287
 

I wonder has anyone called the airline: bearing in mind that (according to FR24) its still within London controlled airspace. I do not have a No.

CAT III

(Ive used this service over the years by the way over the years)

Yes. Although if something big enough to be seen at that distance has fallen off, it's likely to be apparent on the turnround at SFO.

The aircraft is due back at 3 pm tomorrow - if it's late, we'll know why.

BA are aware...
 

Apparently BA maintenance control are aware of the observation - whether that is a result of this thread or another eyewitness report I don’t know.

As Daysleeper has pointed out unless there are obvious flight deck effects or the panel is directly visible from the cabin the chances are the crew won’t know anything has gone missing.

FWIW as a matter of routine the airframe should get at least 2 full external inspections on the turn....

I let MRO AOG know.

Plexus - you should have taken immediate action like ringing the police if you didn't have any ATC numbers. Who/what is "MRO AOG" ?

What did they say ?

Maintenance, Repair, Operations (i.e. the engineering support teams), and
Aircraft On Ground (i.e. an aircraft with a serious enough problem to ground it, obviously a big priority for the MRO team!)

BA286 pushed back on time at SFO, LHR arrivals showing it due in around 45 minutes early this afternoon.

I think we can safely conclude that the aircraft is intact.

MRO in the airline industry is normally used as an acronym for a Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul organisation.

It's typically either an offshoot of an airline (for example Lufthansa Technik) or a standalone company (ST Aerospace, etc). BA Engineering has an MRO offshoot which provides E&M services to other operators, though it's not really relevant in this context.

AOG, as described above, is either the situation of having an aircraft grounded or the department within an airline tasked with organising the resources (manpower, spares, etc) required to get the affected aircraft back in the air again ASAP.

Be interested to know how the OP got hold of “MRO AOG”...? BA Switchboard? Such a department wouldn’t be the first choice for real time airborne engineering issues, but somebody there would at least know how to pass info to the people in the control centre who deal (with amongst lots of other things) the live issues involving aircraft in flight, so kudos to the OP for trying.

As DR has said the aircraft seems to have aircraft turned at SFO fairly normally and actually pushed back a few minutes early.