A brand new British Airways flight attendant on his second only flight accidentally activated an emergency evacuation slide on a Boeing 777-200, preparing for a transatlantic flight from London Heathrow to Washington Dulles on Saturday afternoon.
The mistake would, perhaps, be forgivable if it weren’t for the fact that British Airways has a spate of these accidents every time it brings online new cabin crew.
The latest accident occurred at around 12:35 pm on May 16 as British Airways flight BA-217, operated by a 26-year-old Boeing 777, was pushing back from the gate at Terminal 5, Heathrow Airport.
According to confidential sources cited by the popular cabin crew Facebook group, ‘A Fly Guy’s Cabin Crew Lounge,’ the crew member, who had just left initial training, got confused when he heard the command: “Doors to automatic.”
The command is for the cabin crew to arm the emergency evacuation slide, ensuring that it would automatically activate if the cabin door were opened.
Rather than just arming the door, the crew member then went ahead and yanked the door opening lever, activating an emergency power assist system that threw the door open and deployed the emergency slide at Door 3L (The third door on the left-hand side of the aircraft).
The flight had to be delayed as the airport fire brigade attended the scene. In the end, the same aircraft on which the accident happened was allowed to depart for Washington Dulles at around 7 pm – more than six hours after the flight was meant to leave.
These kinds of incidents are known within the aviation industry as ‘inadvertent slide deployments’, or ISDs. According to European aircraft manufacturer, Airbus, around three ISDs occur around the world every single day.
Normally, ISDs are caused by crew fatigue or confusion, when flight attendants open a cabin door after arriving at a destination but forget to disarm the evacuation slide.
It is much rarer for flight attendants to arm the slide and then immediately open the door. Some experts, however, fear this is an endemic issue with cabin crew training in which new recruits acquire muscle memory that arming a door is always followed by opening the door for an emergency evacuation.
The fact that this keeps happening at British Airways is, however, worrying.
During the airline’s last recruitment campaign for cabin crew in 2023, the airline suffered a spate of ISDs.
In January 2023, a new hire member of cabin crew on one of their first-ever flights accidentally activated an emergency slide as a British Airways Boeing 777 pushed back from the gate at Heathrow Airport, in eerily similar circumstances.
Just six months after BA’s first ISD of 2023, a second member of cabin crew accidentally activated an emergency slide in very similar circumstances.
A few weeks after that, a third BA crew member activated the emergency slide shortly after arrival in Madrid, although the door wasn’t being used for boarding and there were no ground vehicles trying to access the aircraft. In other words, there was no reason for the crew member to open the door.
In an attempt to reduce the number of ISDs the airline was experiencing, British Airways turned to a Japanese workplace ritual known as Shisa Kanko, which translates in English to mean ‘pointing and calling’.
Developed in the early 1900s on Japan’s railway network, Shisa Kanko involves train drivers and station staff pointing and calling out the status of the signal. The movement is deliberately exaggerated in order to slow down the process and get the person performing Shisa Kanko to focus solely on the task at hand.
One study into the practice claimed that Shisa Kanko reduces human error by nearly 85%.
For British Airways, Shisa Kanko will involve cabin crew pointing at the door and calling out whether the door is armed or disarmed before preparing the door for departure or arrival.
Of course, that doesn’t help if a crew member is working on autopilot and just opening an armed door for no reason.
