BA plane's emergency landing at Heathrow caused by maintenance error

[oldironside]

A maintenance error led to engine parts being blown off a British Airways plane that was forced to make an emergency landing at Heathrow last week, investigators have confirmed.

Pictures showed that the cowls covering the aircraft engines were not properly shut, leading the 40kg metal coverings to fly loose during takeoff.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/31/ba-plane-emergency-landing-maintenance-error

Didn't the pilot do a walk round check before accepting the plane? How could the flight crew have missed that before takeoff?

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Would an unsecured cover be obvious from the ground?

All it says is "not properly shut", which needn't mean that the lower section that you can see from ground level was in the wrong place or visibly loose. It didn't fall off until it was taking off.

On edit: In fact, it turns out you have to crouch down to check it's properly closed; but you're right, the air crew are meant to do that (as well as maintenance, of course):

The Airbus A320-family Flight Crew Operating
Manual (FCOM) Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)
PRO‑NOR-SOP-05 for the exterior walk-around
includes a check on each engine that the fan cowl doors
are closed and latched. To perform this check it is
necessary to crouch down so that the latches are visible.

http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/AAIB%20S3-2013%20G-EUOE.pdf

[oldironside]

2. And it's not just for an Airbus.

It's standard for any aircraft and no pilot in his right mind would even consider omitting his pre-flight walk round, unless he wanted to end up like this.



This is the prototype B-17 that crashed when the control locks were left in place.