Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it could have helped the flight attendants to quickly determine the exits that are safe. For obvious reasons, ordering the evacuation, in conjunction with criteria such as which side and which doors is the Captain's job, or if the Captain is incapacitated, the First Officer. They will have access to far more data than the cabin crew will (e.g. whether the engines are safely shut down, circumstances on the ground th…
This is not at all obvious. The pilots can't look backwards and don't have eyes in the cabin. There have been cases of engine fires and failures where the pilots had to go into the passenger cabin to examine the damage. Communication is key, but comms might have been down, too. In cases like this the cabin crew have to be prepared to initiate an evacuation on their own, and they have to be prepared to choose which do…
>In the meantime, the cabin crew had been attempting to get the pilots’ attention using the emergency call button, but all the pilots were so focused on the failures that they initially didn’t notice. Only now did they send Second Officer Mark Johnson to assess the situation in the cabin, whereupon a Qantas pilot riding as a passenger in the upper deck drew his attention to the in-flight entertainment system, which featured a live view of the aircraft from a tail-mounted camera. The digital stream clearly showed a much more literal stream of fuel pouring from the left wing and into the aircraft’s wake, which was also visible with the naked eye from the lower deck. Johnson proceeded down to check for himself, at which point he also observed for the first time that there were two gaping holes in the top of the left wing, surrounded by jagged metal, where the turbine disk fragments had exited.