Friday, January 18, 2008

Coward the Hero!

Get used to headlines like that, I suspect they will magically appear in tomorrow's papers, for John Coward, the co pilot of BA038 was the one who landed the plane after a loss of power.

From news reports the plane lost power at 600 feet. That must have been fun for the pilots. There would have been little time to react, and crucially no room for error. The plane would have had to take a steeper decent to maintain speed, hence landing harder than normal and short of the runway.

The flight crew and emergency services excelled themselves, we would expect nothing less. Then the passengers were kept hanging around with no refreshments for hours by petty bureaucrats who were apparently very unhelpful. With regret, again I would expect nothing less.

The BBC has this on the co-pilot, this on the report, and this on how passengers were let down afterwards.

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