This
is the terrifying story of an aviation disaster that was narrowly nipped in the bud in June 1990, when a wrongly-installed panel of the windscreen
on British Airways Flight 5390 fell out, causing the plane’s cockpit to
decompress and its captain to be pulled halfway out of the aircraft at
over 17,000 feet.
BA 5390 left Birmingham Airport at 7.20am,
heading for Malaga in Spain. At the controls were Captain Tim
Lancaster, 42, and his co-pilot, 39-year-old Alastair Atchison, both
experienced flyers, and their take-off was routine.
Less than 15
minutes into the flight, with the plane at 17,300 feet over Oxfordshire,
there was a loud bang in the cockpit, and the windscreen on the
captain’s side blew out from its mooring, causing immediate
decompression.
Both pilots had loosened their harnesses, and
Lancaster was forcefully pulled toward the open window by the rush of
air. The whole top half of his body was dragged out of the plane, with
only his legs remaining inside, caught on the flight controls.
Flight
attendant Nigel Ogden, on the flight deck at the time, quickly grabbed
hold of Lancaster’s belt, while the stricken captain was flung from side
to side by powerful winds and began to lose consciousness in the thin
air at that altitude.
Ogden, too, began to suffer from frostbite
and exhaustion, and was relieved by chief steward John Heward and flight
attendant Simon Rogers.
Lancaster’s head was now banging against
the side of the cockpit, leading the crew to believe he had died.
Fortunately they held onto him in fear that his body might get sucked
into the plane’s engine.
Given permission for an emergency
landing at Southampton Airport, Atchison brought the plane down safely
as the crew hung on grimly to Lancaster. The pilot was discovered to be
alive and was rushed to hospital as frightened passengers disembarked.
The whole ordeal had lasted 22 minutes.
BA Flight 5390. The story
BA Flight 5390, a BAC One-Eleven, was carrying 81 passengers and six crew at the time of the incident.
When
the window was blown out, the force of the air rushing out of the
aperture caused the door of the flight deck to blow inwards and fall
onto the plane’s controls. The throttle was forced open, meaning that
the plane was accelerating as it began to lose altitude.
Heading
downwards at 80 feet a second and with winds of -17C rushing around
them, the crew were forced to cling onto the unconscious Lancaster,
whose weight was made equivalent to 500lb due to the suction force of
the air outside the plane.
Lancaster was treated for fractures to
his right arm, left thumb and right wrist, as well as frostbite and
shock. Remarkably, he returned to work within five months.
Flight
attendant Nigel Ogden suffered a dislocated shoulder and frostbite to
his face and eye. He returned to work after a break but suffered
post-traumatic stress and took early retirement in 2001. No-one else
involved in the incident was injured.
Accident investigators
discovered that when the windscreen had been refitted to the plane the
night before, the wrong bolts had been used to secure it; they were
little more than half a millimetre too small, and had failed under
intense air pressure.
The bolts had actually replaced other
incorrect ones; the engineer, working under pressure and without
reference to manuals, had simply replaced the old bolts with new ones on
a like-for-like basis.
As a result of the incident, windscreens
on British Airways planes are now secured by bolts on the inside of the
plane, rather than the outside, putting them under even less pressure.
Culled from Wikipedia
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