A Close One

We had a disturbing event last night in Atlanta. We had closed up the doors and armed the slides for automatic deployment, and the ramp crew had pulled the stairs away from the aircraft in preparation for pushback. After a delay, the stairs were pushed back to the airplane, and a mechanic came up to bring us some paperwork, opening the door without ever letting us know his intentions. Normally, there would be a signal on the interphone or just visually, and he would wait for the flightcrew's approval before opening the door so we'd have time to disarm it, but this did not occur. The reason this is a big deal is that the door is designed to blow open and deploy the slide automatically if it's armed and the door opens for an evacuation. There is a mechanical interlock that deactivates this system when the door is opened from the outside so that rescuers can get to the crew if we're unable to open the door ourselves, but we are trained never to take chances with this last-ditch safeguard. The door is always disarmed and opened from inside if there are crewmembers onboard. Of course, if the airplane is empty, then no one would have been inside to arm the doors, so they can safely be opened from the outside. Anyway, this guy had apparently gotten complacent about opening the door and hadn't paused to think about the fact that he was one mechanical failure away from certain death or severe injury. I had a few words with him about how lucky he was and then we closed up again and the flight proceeded to Newark without further incident. Today, I filled out a safety report advising that the Atlanta maintenance personnel might need some remediation in this area. I'm just thankful that the safeguard worked and no one got hurt!