Oh hey, I need a pic of that!

Came to FL lounge yesterday evening enjoying a few glass of Champagne before flying to London.

What surprised me that plenty of AA mechanical crew started to make pictures of the plane from around 430pm (scheduled departure 740pm). This caught my attention and as you can see on the pic, a part of the cowling engine #2 was missing. Given that I prepared myself for a cancellation but was surprised that, after a long discussion on the tarmac, load masters started to load the containers. Huh??

I thought 'really that's how we fly over the Atlantic'?

In the end, 2 more senior decision makers came at about 7pm and cancelled the flight (I think luckily). There was plenty of hail damage around on the plane (cone in front damaged, missing paint) etc. AA idea's then was to delay the flight until 230am as they ferry in a 777 from DFW - I gave up earlier and have asked them for rebooking +24 hours. Got cancellation notification then at 11pm so the ferry flight never happened but I was happy in my hotel room.

Anyway good to see it's (in the end) safety first but too eventful for my liking
Daniel