A British Airways pilot has reportedly been stood down after accidentally triggering the emergency exit on a busy A320.
The unnamed 22-year-old was piloting a service recently arrived from the Czech Republic at Heathrow airport on Saturday, last week, for a quick turnaround to Bucharest.
To add to the problem, passengers boarding for flight BA886 to the Romanian capital were extremely short on space for hand luggage. Then came a blunder that allegedly cost the airline £50,000 ($100,000) and a new rubber slide.
The pilot left the cabin and attempted to exit the aircraft, forgetting to “disarm” the emergency slides – and one exploded outwards, blocking Gate 24E.
The incident was first reported by the Sun, which said the pilot had opened the door to pass documents to ground crew.
The reality was even more bizarre. Having run out of space for passengers’ carry-on luggage in the overhead bins, the flustered captain opened the door to move excess bags into the plane hold.
The Sun reported that the pilot has since been suspended from duties for what was “beyond a rookie error. It’s totally baffling to understand”.
The flight, scheduled for at 9.55am on Saturday, was delayed by more than four hours.
A statement from the airline said a new aircraft was sourced to carry out the flight.
“We apologised to customers and arranged a replacement aircraft to ensure they were able to continue their journey,” said BA.
According to Simple Flying, this is just the latest door malfunction for the British flag carrier.
There have been five inadvertent emergency exit deployments in little over 12 months.
This year BA136 from Heathrow to Mumbai was delayed by an accidental slide blowout. There was another slide incident in January last year, on a BA Boeing 777 bound for Lagos.
Accidental emergency door activations are very costly for airlines. The Sun reported the cost of replacing the side and disruption was close to £50,000.
An estimate from Simple Flying put the cost of replacement of and rectifying an emergency exit on an A320 as closer to $50,000, including the $20,000 cost of repacking, and safety checks by engineers.
Arm your doors and plane ISDs
You may have heard the ominous-sounding instruction for cabin crew to “arm your doors”.
This has nothing to do with placing guards on the exits or that your aircrew may be locked and loaded. The instruction “arm your doors” refers to the firing mechanism that deploys the inflatable evacuation slide built into aircraft doors.
Opening without “disarming” will result in an “Inadvertent Slide Deployments”.
That might sound like a lot of fun, but it’s a headache for airlines and passengers. ISDs are a lot more frequent than you think, too.
According to manufacturers Airbus, there are about 30-40 per year.
“The minimum cost of an event involving a 90-minute ground delay is estimated at around US$11,000 ($17,000). If the ISD leads to a flight cancellation and a requirement to accommodate passengers in hotels, the cost can rise as high as US$200,000.”
If the inadvertently activated slide is attached to an air bridge it can cause the door to be ripped off and block exits, taking planes and docking bays out of service.
Airlines have varying disciplinary measures for crew who trigger an ISD – for some it could be grounds for dismissal.
