Airbus cowlings - LHR

empip

empip

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An old chestnut - perhaps ?

This COULD have been at the root of the recent Heathrow scare.

Untitled

Untitled


See p.16 - http://tinyurl.com/n9ee5uy A320 family includes A319.

Only around 18 ins clearance lower engine inlet cowl to hardstanding - Engaged but not fastened latches not easily visible.

IMHO Poor design with so many (and there have been) unfastened occurances. 'Each fan cowl cover weighs 40 Kg' !!


Very large diam' jubilee clip would do the job ?


-0-
 
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They will need to run extensive tests - on a conveyor :mrgreen:
 
My mate lives in Rickmansworth, which is on the Heathrow flight path.

Coincidentally, he has an engine cowling for an Airbus on Ebay right now. BA colours, but slightly fire damaged. :LOL:
 
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Original thread was musing about the engine doors being left unlatched, missed during pre flight checks.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...engine-fire-inquiry+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk

"...A British Airways plane was forced into an emergency return to Heathrow, flying on one damaged engine with the other ablaze, because tired technicians had been working on the wrong aircraft, investigators have found...
The Air Accident Investigation Bureau found that the covers of the Airbus A319’s engine, the fan cowls, were left unlatched during maintenance by two technicians who intended to return and top up the oil. When the pair attempted to complete the task three hours later in the night shift, they went back to another plane, anAirbus A321, at a different stand, leaving the A319’s covers open.

Nightshifts and overtime may have left staff “compromised by fatigue”, investigators said. One of the two BA technicians had worked 70 hours over seven consecutive days and nights and was on the second of two 12-hour overtime nightshifts. The open covers were then missed by a pilot and a ground handler in inspections before takeoff...
Crew apparently failed to understand fully what passengers who witnessed the incident were telling them and an initial attempt by a senior cabin crew member to reach the captain was unsuccessful. Investigators found that “information regarding the fuel leak was not assimilated by the cabin crew and not passed to the flight crew as required”.

Almost three tonnes of fuel leaked out of the right engine during the flight around London before the captain shut it down after fire alarms sounded. Investigators also found that the captain risked switching off the wrong engine by not following procedure and confirming his actions to the co-pilot as the plane approached Heathrow again..."

Blimey 2 yrs to get this info' out.

Productivity low in UK? They only worked 70 hrs, there are 168 hrs in a week !

Boris's Low Emission zones ??? 'Oi 'ave 3 tonnes of jet fuel me old cocker'

:(
 
The AAIB continued: "Had the leaking fuel not ignited, or had the fuel leak been isolated sooner, there would have been no fire and the event would have been relatively benign. However, an external fire broke out on the right engine when the aircraft was already established on approach to land back at Heathrow. The immediate risk posed by the fire, at such a late stage, meant that a landing at Heathrow was the safest option." and continued: "The QRH fuel leak procedure required the right engine to be shut down and, given the location of the damaged fuel pipe, this would have isolated the fuel leak, preventing the fire. The commander, however, decided that shutting down the right engine would have exposed the aircraft to an unacceptable risk, as the condition and degree of damage to the left engine was unknown and there was no certainty of its continued operation. ... When the fire broke out in the right engine, the risk to the aircraft presented by the fire was greater than that of the condition of the left engine and the commander responded accordingly by shutting down the engine."
Click to expand...

The AAIB analysed: "Inspection of the fan cowl door latches from G-EUOE showed that the latch high visibility paint was mostly missing from the latch handles. That which remained was partially obscured by blue paint overspray. In this condition, the open latch handles would have been significantly less conspicuous than if they had been painted according to SB V2500-NAC-71-0227. Therefore their condition was a contributory factor in reducing the prominence of the open latches."
Click to expand...

These quotes are from the Aviation Herald
 
It's a bit worrying reading the Safety First pdf, probably best not to know all the things that can go wrong.

Having recently moved, I now get planes overhead approaching Exeter airport, which I find fascinating as they are very low in the sky. I was 'gobsmacked' yesterday as two of these flew over my garden:

c17render01.jpg


It is a real beast of a plane. Apparently one crashed in Canada few years ago

 
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