Captain SUCKED OUT mid-flight! | British Airways Flight 5390

this video has been made possible together with brilliant use the link in the video description below for your special deal it's a great sunday morning in the united kingdom now back 111 aircraft from british airways is on their initial departure from birmingham international airport on their way down towards sunny malaga in spain the cabin crew is getting ready for their breakfast service and in the cockpit the captain and the first officer is relaxing a little bit and they're starting to loosen up their seat belts suddenly a bang is heard and the entire cabin is filled with dense condensation fog the cockpit door is violently thrown into the cockpit and when the cabin crew looks through the debris inside of the cockpit to their horror they realized that the captain has been sucked halfway out from the aircraft through a hole where the forward left windshield used to be what happens next is an incredible story and it is the story of british airways flight 5390. stay tuned british airways flight 5390 took off on the 10th of june 1990. there were 81 passengers on board four cabin crew members and two pilots and the aircraft that was being flown was a 19 year old back 111. now the baku 111 looks a little bit like a dc niner it's a short medium-hole aircraft with two rear-mounted low bypass jet engines and it was known as a very reliable workhorse of the sky now this particular aircraft that was used on this day had been on the ground for about 27 hours prior to this flight because it had to undergo some mandatory maintenance the previous crew had reported that they had seen some darkening and some bubbles on the left-hand windscreen the windscreen just ahead of the captain and that needed to be changed and the maintenance work that took place on this aircraft prior to departure is going to be really important but we'll get to that in a second in the cockpit was captain timothy lancaster he's 42 years old he's got about 11 0050 hours of total time of which 1075 is on the back 111. together with him was first officer aleister atkinson he is also quite experienced 7 500 hours in total of which 1100 hours on the back 111 now the day started just like any other normal sunday flight the weather outside was grey but good visibility light winds and the crew was reported to be really really happy about doing this flight because generally these weekend kind of holiday destination flights tend to bring really happy and relaxed passengers so the crew was looking forward to a nice and easy day at work they also knew each other really well they were a tightly knit gang and the only one that was really new to the crew was first officer alistair the flight crew had prepared for the flight just as normal there was no bad weather expected first officer alastair was the one who's going to be pilot flying for the departure and then according to british airways standard operating procedures at the time timothy the captain would take over after the initial takeoff and then he will be flying for the remainder of the flight so said and done the aircraft pushed back and at time 0720 utc the aircraft took off towards malaga now if you take off from birmingham and i've done this many times you have to go through london airspace which is one of the most busy airspaces in the world and this means that you can expect to get a lot of different radar headings and a lot of different altitude clearances as you climb out and this is exactly what happened to bridgeshare with flight 5390 as well initially they were cleared on a suddenly vector heading of 195 degrees to maintain and they climbed up to flight level one four zero fourteen thousand feet they remained there for a while and then eventually they got cleared into a different air traffic control sector once they changed over to that sector they were cleared to flatten two three zero 23 000 feet and they were expecting eventually to get up to their initial cruising altitude of 25 000 feet now as the crew had completed their initial departure procedures they started to relax a little bit and you it's important for you to understand how we the pilots use the seat belts when we're in the cockpit so generally most airlines will require us to be completely strapped in with a full seat belt on from take up up to about ten thousand feet and then from ten thousand feet down to landing but between there we can kind of relax the seats a little bit we tend to have a full harness which consists of a seat belt around our waist and then across the crotch and then two kind of shoulder harnesses of this but the shoulder harnesses are not really comfortable to wear you know long term so that tends to be the first thing that we remove and the way that we do that is that there is a button at the back of the seat belt buckle we push that the only thing that happens is that the seat belt shoulder harness releases but the rest of the seat belt stays intact and this is exactly what the crew of british airways 5390 did as well so they released the shoulder harnesses and captain tim kind of loosened up the waist seat belt a little bit as well in order to make it more comfortable the aircraft now continued to climb and as they were doing so the cabin crew was getting ready for the first meal service of the day which is going to be breakfast for the passengers but as the aircraft climbed through about 17 300 feet a large bag could be heard from inside of the cockpit almost immediately the entire cabin filled with dense condensation fog and the cockpit door was violently flung into the cockpit where it jammed itself behind the thrust levers now when everyone had regained their bearings after the initial shock the number three cabin crew looked in through the debris inside of the cockpit and realized to his horror that the upper body of the captain was sucked out through the left-hand windshield and the only thing that was still inside of the cockpit was his leg that had gotten tangled in the flight controls so the number three without hesitation ran in and started to hold the captain around his waist to stop him from sliding more out through the window but he reported that the upper body the back of the captain was kind of flush up against the body of the aircraft and his head was banging towards the left tv window as the captain was sucked out to the window his feet had actually pushed the flight controls and as they did that they disconnected the autopilot so this means that the first officer was now faced with a situation where he had an explosive decompression he had his colleague being partially sucked out through the window which you could see there would have been an enormous inflow of really cold air and noise in the cabin loads of debris had been thrown into the cockpit because of the loss of the window so this is a very very serious situation right now and the first officer realized very quickly that the first thing he needed to do was to get the aircraft down because the back 111 did not have automatic masks for the passengers that wasn't a requirement when the uh back 111 was certified instead there was passenger oxygen that could be given to about 18 passengers on demand but this meant that he now needed to get the aircraft down quickly now he had a choice at this point to put his own oxygen mask on as well but he realized that they were at 17 300 feet when this happened because the outer pilot had been disconnected and the captain had kicked the flight controls the aircraft had already initiated a fairly rapid descent so he didn't think that was any need for him to put his own oxygen mask on because he realized that if he did he would have huge problems communicating but both are traffic controlled but also with the cabin crew who is now in holding on to the captain for dear life so the first officer is now flying the aircraft he's maintaining his heading of 195 degrees he's initiated his descent and he now calls a mayday call to air traffic control because of the enormous noise inside of the cockpit air traffic control could hear him call mayday but when they responded he couldn't hear them properly so it took a few minutes to establish the nature of the problem with air traffic control and even when air traffic control realized that they were dealing with a serious emergency they kept taking on other traffic onto the frequency as well and this was going to be something that the investigation was going to hone in on later on but we'll talk about that later ft aircraft is now descending down towards 10 000 feet the number three his name is nigel ogden who's holding on to the captain he's starting to lose his grip and that's partially because of the slipstream pulling on the captain wanting to to pull him further out but also because nigel is in the direct stream of air and the temperature outside as the maneuver initiated was about minus 17 degrees celsius now with the speed of the aircraft and the rush of the air the wind chill factor with that kind of temperature would probably have been around minus 42 degrees celsius or minus 44 degrees fahrenheit so it's extremely cold and he's getting frostbite both on his arms but also onto his left eye the rest of the cabin crew is seeing this happening the purser has already gone in and started to collect the porch of the broken door he's taking care of that putting it inside of the front left toilet but as is seeing this happening both the purser and the number two cabin crew comes in to try to relieve nigel from holding the captain the purser kind of rips his arm around the seat belts on the jump seat which is behind the captain's chair and holds the captain as nigel gets out of the way and then the number two cabin crew comes in sits down and grabs a hold of the ankles of the captain and he's going to be staying inside of the cockpit for the remainder of the flight as the aircraft is now descending down the first officer is asking for as much support as he can possibly get from air traffic control and he's asking initially to get radar vectors toward gatwick airport because this is an airport that he knows really well air traffic control is culminating his request they say that they can give him vectors towards gatwick but they also tell him that he has southampton airport really close by and he can choose which one of these airports he wants to go to first officer aleister is a little bit hesitant at first but then realizes that he really wants to get down on the ground as soon as he can so he asks for vectors towards southampton airport but he also says that he needs about 2 500 meters of runway southampton airport is only about 1700 meters air traffic control relays this information to the first officer the first officer is a little bit hesitant at first because he recognizes that you know they just took off from birmingham they have a lot of fuel on board they're probably quite heavy but after some quick calculations says that he can accept 1700 meters and southampton and he starts getting vectors into to that the problem in southampton is that they don't have any instrument landing system they only have a vor so he asks to get vectored for a visual approach in towards southampton now just to give you a little bit of perspective here um the first officer is now faced with the situation where he is dealing with a serious emergency to his aircraft he doesn't have his colleague helping him out he is not able to use his cabin crew to help him out of reading checklists and so on because they are holding on to the captain so this is now all up to him and he has to do a visual approach into an airport to which he's not very familiar so this is going to cause a lot of stress on the first officer but even though he is under this pressure he still managed to safely set the aircraft up configure it for landing and he even remembers to switch on the auxiliary power unit the apu so that he has electrical power when he gets done on the runway because he realizes that he's going to have to shut the engines down to get the passengers off and unless the apu is running it's going to be delayed this is an amazing show of cool airmanship and situational awareness on behalf of the first officer and this is something that is going to receive prices for after this is over so what's happening to the captain then well the crew reports after the incident that they were completely convinced that he had died all right you can even hear on the transcripts from the air traffic control interaction with the first officer that he reports that the captain has been sucked out to the window i think he's dead so as the aircraft is descending down to around 3000 feet they are really surprised to uh to see that the legs of the captain is starting to kick now the captain after the incident actually describes that he as he got sucked out he was initially conscious right he was surprised that he was able to breathe eventually he lost consciousness but that he regained it later on so as the aircraft now comes in and does a picture-perfect visual approach into runway 02 in southampton the aircraft comes to a stop on the runway the passengers are disembarked during the normal exits and then the firefighter comes in and helps the captain out from the position he's still hanging outside of the window of the aircraft they get him onto a an ambulance obviously and it turns out that apart from frostbite a broken thumb and a fractured arm he is perfectly okay the only other person that received any kind of injuries on this flight was the cabin crew nigel ogden who while he was holding the captain had some frostbite damage to one of his eyes and a dislocated shoulder but all of the passengers managed to get out safely and eventually the captain recovered and he actually returned to service only about five months after this harrowing incident but what actually caused this how come that the windshield would just suddenly disattach itself and fly away mid-air well after this short break i'm gonna tell you what caused this this video is brought to you together with brilliant now i have said this many times before and i keep saying it brilliant is an absolutely brilliant way of increasing your maths and your physics knowledge without feeling like you're going to school right they have a lot of interactive courses they do these fantastic brain puzzles that you have to sit and think through and i really love the way that they break down a really complex problem into several small parts they let you kind of solve them one by one and if you come up against something that you don't really understand well then they would explain it to you so that you can take the next step in the possible now i have been working on brilliant together with my son lucas who's 11 years old and he just loves doing these little brain puzzles and he gets so excited every time that he gets one of them right and you could do this together with your children as well anyway if you use the link here in description below which is brilliant.org mentor pilot you'll get a whopping 20 off the annual subscription fee of brilliant but it's completely free to go and check it out so go down click the link and enjoy as the investigation started into british airways flight 5390 they started looking back into the maintenance records of this back 111 and they realized that 27 hours before the departure during the night shift the maintenance crew that had been working on the aircraft had seen that there was a need to replace the captain's side windshield now they were a little bit short of people so the uh the manager the maintenance manager himself had decided to do the job and he had gone to the aircraft that was in hangar at that time it was raining outside and he'd set up a working station in order to do this the problem was that it was a little bit tight so he couldn't really get the work station into the right place this meant that he had to work with his himself on top of the scaffolding kind of hanging over the nose of the aircraft to kind of reach all of the bolts that was needed to fasten the windshield now the windshield on the back 111 is not fitted like most other aircraft from the inside and out that would have given it a kind of plug type which meant that as the pressure inside of the aircraft builds up the pressure would hold the windshield in place instead the back 111 has a windshield that is mounted from the outside and in and because of that it needed a quite large amount of screws to hold it in place in fact it was 90 different screws needed and as the windshield was dismounted the engineers found that a lot of the screws were damaged because of the way that they dismounted them so they needed replacing them but when they went to get new screws they didn't look at the maintenance description of how to actually do this procedure instead they just took the screws that they had used before and they went over to their storage to get more of these screws it turned out that the person that was working the storage at the time only had four of these particular screws so the manager just went down into kind of the basement where it was very poorly lit and looked to find similar screws but instead of looking at the description as in the type of screw that he was using he held these screws up next to each other and until he found some screws that he thought looked identical the issue was that when he used these screws these screws had the same kind of thread size as the original screws but they were about 0.66 millimeters thinner as in less diameter so this meant that as the screws were actually entered into the holes it felt like they were actually attached but because they were thinner that didn't actually attach to the holes the way that it should be doing he would have noticed this if he would have been in a position where he could view these heads of the screws because they were counter sunk and the the the size of the screw heads were much smaller on these screws than they were on the proper screws which meant that if you would have compared the left windshield with the right windshield would have seen that the screws on the right windshield actually covered the kind of counter sink almost entirely but the screws that he was using was going well inside of the hole but he didn't notice that partially because of the way that he was working over the the kind of top of the nose of the aircraft but also because he was using some incorrect tooling to actually fit the screws into the holes which didn't allow him to feel that the amount of torque that was necessary to um to fix the screws was incorrect now on top of this because the engineer who actually did this change of the windshield was also the shift manager it meant that he was also responsible for verifying the quality of any work that has been done during his shift so this meant that there was no other engineer who could come there and verify that the job had been properly done now there were rules at the time if maintenance was done on certain points of the aircrafts that would deem to be vital points then another engineer had to come by and check it out but the windshield was not considered a vital point funnily enough which meant that there was no one there to check this so the first time that the quality of this maintenance job actually was tested was on a flight where the passengers were on board and the windshield started being subjected to the pressurization of the aircraft now we all know now what happened at the aircraft part 17 300 feet the differential pressure between the inside of the aircraft and the outside of the aircraft became so big that these faulty screws that weren't wide enough just could not hold the pressure and the entire windscreen just popped up the windscreen was recovered later on on the field with some of these screws still attached to it and that's how they could verify that the incorrect screws had been used the shift manager had one last chance to pick up this mistake before the aircraft got airborne because since the aircraft was actually sitting on the ground for 27 hours before the flight he was working on a different aircraft on the following day which also needed a replacement of the windshield but in that occasion the job was kind of set up for him so when he arrived to replace the windshield he had not only the new windshield but also the 90 screws that was needed for the job and he recognized that the screws that was used on that job was different than the ones that he had used the previous day but he basically just thought that well maybe there are different models and he didn't think much more of it but there was probably the best kind of point to pick up this mistake now the investigation team came to a couple of different conclusions based on this there were basically three caution factors the first one was that an individual in this case a shift manager was responsible to do the job and to sign off that the job had been correctly done because this was not considered a vital part so there was no cross-checking being done the second point was that this shift maintenance manager's ability and potential to do this maintenance job correctly was severely eroded by his lack of professional attitude of adherence to the standard operating procedures that were available and his use of incorrect tooling so this was kind of seen as being the main factor in here and the third point was that british airways had not been able to through their quality systems and their reporting system find out that these kind of faulty work practices had crept in to stop this from happening in the first place that's some quite damaging feedback coming from the investigation team and when i read this report i couldn't i couldn't help but feel sorry for the engineer because from all i could read he was an exemplary employee by british airways he'd done an absolutely fantastic job up until that point he seemed to really care about the quality of his job the quality of his colleagues and its teams but it's just been one of those cases where inadequate procedures and careful procedures had kind of crept in over long term and the fact is that engineers were not giving recurrent training at a time so once you had your engineering job and your engineering license you could just continue to work and whenever inadequate kind of procedures and ways to work creeps in there was no way really to to catch it there were eight different recommendations that came out of this accident investigation the most important ones were that the there needed to be a review of the system where one engineer could be both doing a engineering task and self-certifying that it had been properly done even though it was not considered a vital point okay so that system needs to be reviewed they also needed to be a better more efficient quality assurance program uh outlined where people that was actually working like the engineers in this case could clearly and easily outline faults and problems with procedures and so on and that could be brought to the tension of the company there was also a recommendation saying that recurrent training should be introduced to engineers so that if some kind of bad work practices or non-adherence to procedures started to creep in over time well then the recurrent training kind of catch that and push the people in towards the right way of doing things much like the way that we do it with pilots nowadays there was also a recommendation that air traffic controllers needed to get a formalized both theoretical and practical course on how to deal with emergencies before they were certified i'm guessing that they were still trained on this before this accident but that the investigation team thought that it was inadequate and that there needed to be some kind of improvement on this training system so as you can see guys just like with every single one of these videos i do about incident and accident the industry is learning from what's happening right we see what is happening we investigate it and then we apply procedures to make sure that these kind of emergencies shouldn't happen again this is how we work as an industry and that's what i'm hoping that you're taking away from these videos as well now i hope that you find these videos interesting to watch and if you do i hope that you have subscribed to the channel and that you've highlighted the notification bell i also want to send a special thank you to my patreon crew who are ongoingly supporting the channel i do weekly hangouts with my patreons which is really really great we do it on soon so we can see each other and talk to each other they give me feedback on my videos they also give me suggestions on more videos to come so if you want to take part in this and be part of kind of my inner crew then go to patreon.commentorpilot and any kind of support is greatly appreciated have an absolutely fantastic day wherever you are and i'll see you next time [Music] bye [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 1,528,689

Keywords: BA 5390, Bristish Airways flight 5390, Aviation accident, Aviation incident, Aircrash investigation, Mentour Pilot crash, Mentour pilot, Fear of flying, Captain sucked out of cockpit, BAC 1-11, DC9, Boeing 737, Boeing 737MAX, Nervous flyer, nervous flyer help, Explosive decompression, Mayday, Aircrash investigation 2021, Aircrash documentary, Birmingham, How to become a pilot, pilot life, Rapid decompression, heroe in the cockpit, Aviation documentary, fear of flying help

Id: rGwHWNFdOvg

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021