British Airways Crew Member Accidentally Activates Emergency Slide On Airbus A350 Jet Bound For Austin in £50,000 Mistake

A British Airways cabin crew member accidentally activated an emergency slide on a state-of-the-art Airbus A350 jet as the plane was preparing for departure to Austin, Texas, from the airline’s hub at Heathrow Airport on Sunday morning.

It’s estimated that the cost to replace the slide could set British Airways back around £50,000 on top of a massive compensation bill for up to 331 passengers who were delayed by around six hours.

Embarrassingly, this is the second time in less than six months that an emergency slide has been accidentally opened by a British Airways flight attendant during pushback.

Inadvertent slide deployments, or ISDs as they are known in the industry, aren’t unheard of, but they normally occur after a plane has landed when the crew forget to disarm the slide on arrival.

It’s incredibly rare, however, for flight attendants to accidentally open a door during the pushback process, and this repeat event will raise serious questions about BA’s safety procedures and training.

In preparation for departure, flight attendants ‘arm’ the doors, which simply means that if a door is opened, then the slide will automatically inflate. The question is why the door was opened once it had been armed.

British Airways flight BA191 to Austin had just pushed back from its parking stand on Sunday morning when the slide was accidentally deployed, leading to a full-scale emergency response.

The plane had to be towed back to the stand, and the passengers disembarked while engineers removed the inflated slide and fitted a replacement. In the end, the same plane was used to take the passengers to Austin but with a delay of around six hours.

In January, a brand new BA flight attendant who had just come out of training school ‘blew’ a slide on a Boeing 777 jet bound for Lagos, Nigeria. The incident happened during pushback when and occurred at a door that is only meant to be opened in an emergency.

A spokesperson for British Airways said the airline has “apologised” to the passengers for the delay to their journey.