Originally Posted by
KARFA
i still have no idea why the captain would come out of the flight deck (was the door closed and then opened up again?) and start touching the door with a view to opening it. this is the cc's responsibility for obvious reasons.
Originally Posted by
CCayley
Yes the flight deck door had been closed and was later reopened when the Captain emerged. I assume the Captain received a message that the flight wasn't ready to depart after all and when he emerged he said to one of the Cabin Crew that someone needed to board. The problem was he ‘helpfully’ decided to open the door himself rather than get one of the cabin crew to do it. The Captain was very communicative and kept us all up to date as the incident progressed, including telling us very openly when the plan to have the same flight crew operate the flight changed because BA’s operations people had decided he needed to report to the office for a chat….
My guess here is that the 2 unlabelled bags could not be put into the hold, otherwise this breaks rules about baggage reconciliation with the passenger onboard. Therefore the dispatcher got these 2 bags, went to the airbridge, and captain radio'd or shouted his OK for the airbridge to go back into place. Unfortunately the safefy demo was going on and the crew cannot be disturbed from this. You then had a dispatcher at the closed door, wanting to get the bags over or at least identified, captain thought "OK, let's not hang about, I'll do the door", Forgetting that the door was armed or missing the lever (he should have got any GGL to help him, we all know how to do it). Since the airbridge was in place, the door could be opened, and the baggage at least dealt with, but it was game over for that aircraft and captain, at least for the flight. The captain should have waited a couple of minutes, that was the root cause, it's not the right way to do things.