Hundreds of passengers scheduled to take a British Airways flight from London to Brussels were left with the Monday morning blues after a crew member mistakenly activated an emergency slide.
The error, which caused a lengthy delay and is likely to have cost the airline about £100,000, resulted in the Airbus A321 being taken out of service.
No passengers were on board at the time.
Emergency services attended the scene as a precautionary measure, in line with standard practice.
The incident caused a three-hour delay before another plane was ushered into service for the one-hour, 15-minute flight to Belgium.
‘The crew member wasn’t thinking and made the most basic of errors by deploying the emergency slide while on the ground at Heathrow,’ a source told the Sun.
‘It’s a minimum £100,000 mistake and knocked out services for the rest of the day.
‘This error is not easy to achieve, it really beggars belief. Staff are trained to know the basics.’
British Airways said in a statement that they had apologised to travellers.
The mistaken deployment of an emergency slide on a British Airways service scheduled to fly from London to Brussels on Monday led to a three-hour delay
While no passengers were on board, emergency services attended the scene as a precautionary measure, in line with standard practice
A BA flight lands at Heathrow airport. A similar mishap befell the airline last year, when the captain of a flight to Romania inadvertently deployed an emergency slide before take-off
‘We apologised to customers for the delay and our teams worked hard to arrange a replacement aircraft so customers were able to travel with us as planned,’ said the company.
Video footage of the incident showed police and fire services pulled up alongside the aircraft, with the inflated slide hanging from the side of the fuselage.
Repacking evacuation slides is a costly business, necessitating repair, reinstallation and safety tests.
Failures are almost invariably the result of human error, according to aviation experts.
The latest incident is the second of its kind to befall British Airways over the past year.
Last February, the captain of a BA flight to Romania inadvertently deployed an emergency slide before take-off, causing a similar hold-up.