Personally, I would have thought the logical solution to the long term fleet strategy for BA would be a short haul operation of A319/320/321 and medium/long haul with B787 and B777-300ER. That would be a pretty slick and balanced operation in my view.
IIRC it was just a couple of issues ago in Flight that BA said they plan to start considering the case for A380 operation next year. This is just consideration and will be looked at alongside alternative Boeing options. They will also be assessing the later variants of the A346.
We’d usually have a guy outside with a headset plugged into a jack in the nosewheel bay who we’d communicate with. Most turboprops taxi at constant rpm and just vary the blade angle to control speed so there would only be a small amount of propwash however the guy would be by the nose rather than in line with the props.
At the head of some of the Regional stands at the likes of MAN they do actually have mirrors on the stand head for this purpose…
I remember mirrors when I used to fly turboprops into MAN but they were orientated so that from the cockpit you could see the nosewheel in order to know when to stop the aircraft at the right spot when taxying in. I don’t think you could see behind IIRC.
I find this a most interesting thread as most commercial pilots are desperate to ditch headsets and use hand mikes! My company has an SOP that we have to wear headsets below FL200 so as soon as we are above that we go straight to hand mikes and speakers regardless of whether we are on VHF, HF, Satcom or interphone. Fortunately our cockpit is quiet enough to let us do so.
Fairly common in Europe on turboprops while the Americans seem to do it quite a bit in jets. Makes a lot of noise, throws a lot of cr@p into the engines and make sure you keep your feet off the brakes or the aircraft will end up pointing at the sky!
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