Pilot Sucked Out Of Plane: The Mystery Of British Airways Flight 5390 | Mayday S2 EP1 | Wonder

[Music] [Music] we are in an emergency [Music] it must be one of the most amazing flying stories of all time one that is still hard to believe an airliner full of passengers out of control at seventeen thousand feet and the pilot is stuck outside the plane in the cockpit three frightened flight attendants are clinging to his legs if he slips from their grasp the captain's body could be sucked into the engine and bring down the plane at the controls a young co-pilot is battling to get the plane to the nearest airport [Music] the lives of 87 passengers and crew hang by a thread [Music] a lot of people go through i think it'll never happen to me but you tend to go through life thinking it can i said i thought i was gonna die mother i thought we were gonna do it this bizarre accident tested the limits of human survival and the investigation that followed not only exposed the mistakes behind it but led to new ways of preventing them [Music] for the crew of the british airways flight from birmingham england to malaga spain the 10th of june began like any other day old friends about to do a job they loved [Music] stewards nigel ogden and simon rogers along with stewardess sue prince had worked together on and off for years they're an experienced capable team that takes pride in its work at birmingham um all the cabin crew and all the pilots they all knew each other we're all in first name terms simon was a good friend of mine anyway because we you know just go out for a beer or a courier whatever like that everybody was friendly to everybody else the one new member of the group was alistair atchison an experienced co-pilot he'd just driven down from manchester that morning [Music] morningstar tim lancaster is captain he's been a commercial pilot for 21 years well we've got to get started eh chief steward john heward arrives to give the crew their final briefing good morning everyone good night he's up the uh first officer yeah just down from manchester um i see a new face okay okay malaga right look forward to this uh right nice you can sit up with me up front and talk rugby uh sue where would you like over the wing okay so simon you're at the riot all right now just a few safety questions nigel before takeoff the co-pilot performs a walk around checking the outside of the aircraft for anything wrong in the cockpit captain tim lancaster reviews a log of the maintenance carried out on the plane the day before everything okay fine should just come out of maintenance by the look of it nothing much though just change the windscreen many of the passengers know the flight well and are looking forward to a relaxed trip to spain i was going to catch a plane from birmingham to malaga to meet my mum my sister and i were joining her there for a week's holiday a girls week i live in the south of spain and two or three times a year i come back to see my grandchildren also my mother so everyone lives near birmingham so that's the route i normally take malaga birmingham these unsuspecting passengers and crew were about to begin an adventure of a lifetime seem to have made yourself comfortable do right ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking my name is tim lancaster welcome aboard this british airways flight to malaga unfortunately it seemed laid back and uh quite jovial really you know why it's a lovely day malaga blue skies sunshine sit back and enjoy the flight sunny and we still expect to get you there on time birmingham tower speed bird 5390 we're ready to start and push speed 3.0 clear to start and push ladies and gentlemen we are now going to take you through our safety procedures and equipment as this information is for your benefit we ask you to watch and listen carefully starting number two emergency exits are on both sides and shows you the emergency exit and on all the emergency gear and um because nobody's really watching one chat was quite blase he was reading the times and people weren't really bothering because we've all been on flights and yeah it's no big deal the air can be topped up by using the mouthpiece and there is a whistle for attracting [Music] attention [Music] 80 knots [Music] the bac-111 was known as the jeep of the skies a workhorse that was easy to maintain and had a good safety record at 43 tons this pressurized hull is carrying 81 passengers and six crew and is now climbing to 23 000 feet in just over two hours they should be in spain only a catastrophic accident could bring this plane out of the skies alastair i can see my house from here two minutes into the climb the pilots switch on the autopilot tim lancaster takes off his shoulder straps and relaxes into the flight now i went into the flight deck to ask tim and alistair what the would like to drink you gentlemen like a tea please the usual well one sugar please and i said your breakfast on it'll only be a few minutes now almost 13 minutes after takeoff and at 17 300 feet they're just 5000 feet from their assigned altitude but then in a split second everything changes with a huge explosion the captain's windscreen blows out into the sky almost immediately a white fog forms i saw that really intense stomach body shaking thud [Applause] we were just diving really and then we started to judder like this and i was a bit stunned i didn't i thought well oh god it's a bomb alistair the co-pilot is suddenly fighting for control in a 350 mile an hour wind there's no time to think about the captain who's been blasted out of the window by pressurized air escaping from the aircraft [Music] the rushing wind pins captain lancaster to the roof of the cockpit inside his legs have jammed the control column forward disconnecting the autopilot and pushing the plane down into a dive alastair atchison needs all his flying experience now he's on his own the captain's body is pinned to the outside of the jet as it hurtles down from 17 000 feet the throttles are jammed forward increasing the speed to nearly 400 miles an hour co-pilot alastair atchison has to take command while he fights to bring the plane under control stuart nigel ogden can see his captain as being sucked out of the aircraft and i looked in the flight deck door was resting on the controls and all i could see was tim out the window i jumped over put one foot in the captain's footwell and the other one was down the side of his seat i just grabbed him before he went out completely nigel ogden holds on to the captain for dear life outside a 390 mile an hour blast of wind at minus 17 degrees centigrade smashes into tim lancaster's body the tornado in the cockpit is giving atchison major problems air traffic control can hear his cries for help but the storm rushing through the cockpit drowns out their replies the captain's feet are still pushing against the control column and alistair is struggling to get full control of the plane he's now diving through some of the busiest air lanes in the world with the added danger of a mid-air collision from the cabin lead steward john heward sees the chaos in the cockpit and does what he can to help looked up and there was nigel sort of hanging across the seat in the flight deck in front of me the flight deck door had fallen forwards and trapped itself between the actual door frame and the throttles of the aircraft so i literally stamped on it twice and it literally broke into three or four pieces behind on the wall of the flight deck there is a spare seat for anybody to observe the flight or whatever and i thought well if i put my arm through the seat belt there i can grab both of them and at least we've got some sort of anchor point inside the aircraft [Music] alastair who's never flown with this crew before has to leave them to their own devices and focus on getting the plane to safety he now has control of the throttles john and nigel have wrenched the captain's feet away from the control column but instead of slowing down atchison decides to continue the rapid descent [Music] it will quickly take him out of the way of any other air traffic and take him to a lower altitude where oxygen equipment won't be needed staying too long at a high altitude risks oxygen starvation and this older aircraft is not fully equipped with oxygen for all the passengers on board the airspeed indicator goes into the red [Music] the two other stewards sue prince and simon rogers are trying to prepare the passengers for what they hope will at worst be an emergency landing but as they level out and slow down to 170 miles per hour the captain's body is no longer pinned to the roof and slides round to the side of the plane working his way from the back of the cabin steward simon rogers now catches sight of the chaos in the cockpit for the first time now the aircraft got to sort of flying fairly level simon came up from the back nurse was beginning to get really sort of achy now with his arms and i knew he wasn't gonna let go unless he was sure that tim wouldn't fly out of the window we all had fear in our eyes we were all very sick because we thought you know are the team's going to die or we're going to die you know that was going through my mind but it was up to aleister then and it was up to us three simon and john and myself to hold on to grim death all i remember is tim's arms flailing out his arms seemed about six foot long and he's i'll never forget that his eyes were wide open i mean his face was hitting the side of the side screen but he didn't blink and i i thought to myself and i said to john i said i think he's dead i think he's dead [Music] and i said it you and tyle have to hold on i can't hold on anymore i can't hold on anymore i've lost the feeling in my arms we decided to put simon i said to sam when you sit in that jump seat and fasten yourself in with simon sitting in the seat we'd freed tim's legs from between the control column and the seat so we hooked his feet over the back of the captain's seat and then simon literally put his hands on the top just so he was holding his ankles down hey look what's going on we're gonna be all right but i think the captain's dead well i couldn't believe it because he just told us what a lovely day it was you know blue skies sunshine uh relax and enjoy the flight and the next minute he's dead simon and alistair now face one of their most difficult decisions what to do with the lifeless body of the captain no words are said but for a moment the thought passes between them but the best thing would simply be to let it go [Music] no can you hold on to it please but alistair's order isn't simply an act of compassion releasing the body at the position it was in it would have gone close to the upper area of the wing it could have damaged the leading edge of the wing had it gone over the wing it could very well have gone into the engine quite a lot of damage could have been caused by the release of the body so i think it was a very sensible decision to try and keep him where he was alistair has managed to get down to 11 000 feet without the captain to help he's operating the plane systems from memory and shepherding it around heathrow some of the most congested airspace in the world seven minutes out of contact with the ground he's able to hear the voice of air traffic control for the first time radar assistance onto the nearest airfield please speed word 5390 roger can you accept landing in southampton five three nine zero i am familiar with gatwick who would appreciate gatwick alastair wants to land at gatwick airport as he's flown there many times before but southampton is nearer and even though he's never flown there before he knows he has to get down fast requesting radar assistance into southampton when you're going to an airport that you're not used to you normally have a charts let down plates that kind of thing that you can read up on and learn something of the airport you're going to but he knew nothing of sometimes and he hadn't been there he had no chance because everything had gone out the window there was no let down plates to look at the approach and so on [Music] all the maps and charts blew out of the window with the captain and only the air traffic controller can guide atchison he turns towards southampton southampton this is speedburn five three nine zero do you read speedbird five three nine zero good morning identified on handover from london radar six miles west of southampton airfield what is your passing level uh roger sir i am not familiar with the southampton request you shifted me onto the runway when he when he spoke he was um obviously stressed it sounded uh as if he was under under a fair bit of pressure what is your number of persons on board uh we have uh 84 passengers on board uh and i think that will be all until we are on the ground uh roger that's copied i've been advised it's pressurization failure is that the only problem uh negative uh the uh captain is uh half out of the airplane i understand i believe he's dead roger that it's copied my feeling was when he told me what was going on it was um one of disbelief because it doesn't actually happen you know it's one of these things that you see in films that happens in films but it doesn't happen in real life and it was sort of the the hairs in the back of the neck go up and there's this feeling down the spine the tingle down the spine and you think no it's not for real but it's got to be uh flight attendant holding on to him but uh requesting an emergency facility for the captain i think he is dead affirm what is your passing level uh leaving flight level uh 5 500 feet on uh turn 19. roger that's copied i'll uh give you a little bit more space then i'll turn you onto a heading of eight zero yeah it's a full emergency it's a one rundle contacts the emergency services at the first opportunity could you confirm that the length of runway in southampton is acceptable for uh 111 yes it is acceptable for a 111 and i'll give you the figures shortly as long as we have at least two and a half thousand meters i am happy i'm afraid we don't have two and a half thousand meters neither do bournemouth we have a maximum of 1800 meters atchison is concerned that the plane is above its maximum landing weight being full of fuel for the journey to malaga and the bac-111 can't dump fuel if the runway isn't long enough he faces more problems whether the aircraft could actually stop on the runway or whether the tyres would burst or whether he'd go off go off the end of the runway uh that's obviously what he was worried about when asking for um 2200 meters five three nine zero thank you very much we are three queens and uh that's 45 so we are set for approach but make it please very gentle yes i would indeed you are number one traffic if you think about it all the airline pilot training is done with two pilots uh both compass mentors in the cockpit one flying the airplane and the other one doing all the emergency drills so what you actually had was the captain hanging out the window at least one person hanging on to his legs and alistair flying the airplane with nobody else to talk to speed of five three nine zero nine miles from touchdown you're clear to land wood indicates zero two zero degrees at one four knots descend to height roger sir descending to 1500 feet talk me down all the way i need all the help i can get roger you'll be able to stop the aircraft on the runway and evacuate the aircraft on the runway he must have been about six or seven miles from touchdown and obviously at that point i kept talking until he was happy he could see the runway i was happy to continue looking out the window and land the aeroplane [Music] at the point he said he was visual with the runway i effectively stopped talking thank you very much i have the runway inside thank you you are clear the land do you wish me to continue with any further information negative 32 minutes after takeoff with 81 terrified passengers a nearly full fuel tank and the captain blasted out of the window aleister atchison attempts the most difficult landing of his career [Music] [Music] huh [Music] at 8 55 a.m flight ba 5390 makes a perfect landing at southampton airport immediately emergency vehicles surround the plane firefighters remove the body of the captain and lead the passengers and crew away i remember seeing the co-pilot the man who really if he wasn't for him would have been on the other side by now and uh is walking down the runway very slowly shaking his head and he got an ambulance man walking with him with his arm around the shoulders of the co-pilot and the co-pilot was shaking his head as if i remember that distinctly i don't know why but i do [Music] alistair atchison has carried out a remarkable piece of flying almost unprecedented in aviation history [Music] he has had to pilot his plane without his captain who has undergone physical stresses that nobody could have been expected to survive [Music] i think these extreme conditions no one expects to occur in their lifetime his survival time must have been measured in no more than tens of minutes as he became colder and colder and his body systems began to shut down tim lancaster's body was subjected to a two-pronged assault the physical violence that his body suffered being blown out of the plane and the extreme cold and lack of oxygen at seventeen thousand feet every thousand feet of altitude causes the temperature to drop by two degrees centigrade so the temperature on the outside of the plane would have been around minus 17 degrees centigrade the extreme wind chill also meant his body was losing heat very rapidly he would have lapsed into semi-consciousness and then unconsciousness and as the temperature his core body temperature fell he would have finally died as a result of the excessive cold in that environment despite the trauma that captain lancaster's body suffered there was one final twist to his story you know it's only once i've ever been here 10 years ago in the oxfordshire countryside john heward and nigel ogden are visiting one of their crew members who shared their horrific experiences here he is hi guys john how are you the captain of that fateful flight tim lancaster somehow survived his horrific ordeal there were no fatalities on ba three nine zero yeah that's it now you can go on the three day cruise across there as his frozen lifeless body was removed from the plane nobody thought that tim could have survived such punishment but remarkably he was slowly beginning to emerge from his horrific adventure tim can you hear me i regained some consciousness on the ground at southampton because i remember big red and white things which are obviously fire engines and ambulances not people and not conversation and then my next clear lucid thoughts are in hospital in southampton over the next few days all the bits eventually arrived back in my sort of consciousness and i put the jigsaw together and you know sort of played the whole story for myself and understood what happened there's a big bang a noise of all the air escaping but i remember watching the windscreen move away from the aircraft and then it had gone like a bullet it disappeared into the into the distance and i think there was an even bigger bang or there wasn't even bigger bang and i was very conscious of going upwards and uh well the whole thing became completely surreal then as it would and i was aware of being outside of the airplane but uh that really didn't bother me a great deal what i remember most clearly is the fact i couldn't breathe because i was facing into the airflow and i turned around and actually turned my body around i was sort of looking back along the top of the aircraft at that stage and i could breathe and yes i remember that i can remember seeing the tail of the aircraft i can remember the engines going around and uh and then i don't remember much at all then we stopped at that point i went down there last year and they've changed the airport i'm glad they did hold on because tim was alive i mean he's a very strong man he must have been to survive that i wouldn't have been able to survive it that's all very dramatic it is look tim lancaster's survival was little short of miraculous he'd been minutes away from death it was aleister atchison's flying that saved his life his quick thinking in getting the plane to the ground in only 22 minutes saved lancaster from dying from the effects of exposure and by pure chance the physical trauma he suffered was limited it included a bone fracture in his right arm and wrist a broken left thumb bruising frostbite and shock remarkably within five months tim lancaster had made a full recovery and was flying again of course the captain wasn't the only one to go through a horrific experience battling with the controls whilst the tornado raged through the cockpit was something no commercial pilot could be trained for if it goes comfortable at all just let me know [Music] the few pilots who are able to understand the experience of atchison and his crew include these young royal air force trainees they are being put through a simulation of an explosive decompression in this hyperbaric chamber it duplicates the effects of a window blowing out at 25 medical officers the atmospheric pressure is initially set to 8 000 feet this is the pressure inside the sealed cabin of most commercial aircraft anyone can survive this for many hours with no ill effects any higher than that and the experience is very different students listen will all students please indicate with a clear thumbs up that they are ready for rapid decompression eight farms rest your thumbs students stand by for rapid decompression in five four three two one now the mist in the hyperbaric chamber is identical to the fog formed when the window blew out on ba 5390 at the incident of rapid decompression the air in the cabin can no longer hold onto its water vapor which is then released into the atmosphere as fog [Music] chamber altitude is stable at 25 000 feet high hold is enabled crossbent is on and you're clear to commence hypoxia [Music] training [Music] once the fog clears then the lack of oxygen at that height begins to tell okay start copying these shapes in the right hand margin without oxygen at first we begin to see a reduction in their reaction speed and we see personality changes much like someone experiences when intoxicated with alcohol so we see that some students become euphoric some students become quite subdued and some students begin to develop forgetfulness of your college faces see if they get any prettier whilst you're becoming hypoxic we see increasingly impaired performance in our students thinking is slowed and their reaction speed becomes increasingly slowed until they begin to develop sort of lapses of concentration falling into unconsciousness and finally death if their oxygen supply is not re-established in you flying alone battling nearly 400 mile an hour winds and defeating the possibility of oxygen deprivation alastair atchison's achievement in saving flight 5390 was outstanding [Music] even as the crisis was unfolding accident investigators were rushing to southampton to find an explanation [Music] on the ground at southampton airport the search for clues begins initial investigation shows no distortion to the frame of the windscreen so this rules out a problem with the structure the fact that there are no shards of glass also discounts a bird strike stuart culling senior investigator with the air accident investigation branch has little to go on windscreen was missing there was a certain amount of blood around there were some minor dents and scrapes on the fuselage as you'd expect if the window had gone past and really that was about it apart from a lot of paper scattered around inside one of his first clues comes from the log recovered from the plane he knows the plane had been serviced just the day before and that a windscreen had been replaced he immediately pays a visit to the british airways maintenance hangar at birmingham i wanted to find out exactly what had happened to the aircraft before it took off and i'd arranged that i should talk to the chef maintenance man who fitted the the window there was a slight problem there because he'd been on night duty and consequently he had finished his shift at roughly the same time as the windscreen came out of the aircraft and he wasn't in the fifth state to be interviewed he needed to get some sleep [Music] stuart calling good morning i was expecting you yes good thank you very much is this the uh question this is the main hangar yes yes so in the meantime i i looked around the facility i made sure that any paperwork and any records of the aircraft had been identified and taken away so they couldn't be accessed by anyone else waited until he came in hello i'm from the airb yes and this is my colleague what i'd like to do today is just to find out what went on that uh doing that shift pattern okay and how it went thank you very much [Music] did you notice uh anything about the window itself any uh stress marks that we're worrying you're in my first conversation with the shift maintenance manager was relatively general because of that stage we had no evidence it was relevant yourself uh you didn't delegate it to somebody else and then check it out there's a phone call for you just coming oh right uh would you mind if i took this and um so i took the call and found that it was information about the windscreen which had been found it did cut and there was something like 30 bolts found with it most of which were one size short in diameter one size too small in diameter it was a crucial error on some planes windscreens are fitted from the inside and use the internal pressure inside the cabin to keep them in place but on the 111 the windscreen is bolted on from the outside any weakness in the bolts could mean that the pressure inside the plane would blow the windscreen out it appears culling has very quickly found the mistake and the guilty man um i've had some news which i think is very relevant i've heard from my colleagues who working on the bolts they tell me they're the wrong bolts they're the wrong diameter um no that's not possible they're the exactly the symbols that i took out of there he's a professional man he's very keen on doing things to his mind in the interests of the company and he's suddenly told that he's put a windscreen in using bolts of the wrong size and he's he's absolutely shocked i can show you i'll show you the box i got out there one thing that came out was that he said oh the old bolts went into a waste bin in the hangar where he did the job and they may still be there so we rushed across to the waste bit and found something like 80 discarded bolts this is where i put them these are the these are the bolts and these are the ones you checked against the new ones that's right yeah i took it on the carousel it was really excellent evidence gold as far as i was concerned well i'll take these away okay by comparing the maintenance manual to what the engineer had told him culling is quickly able to identify the first part of the sequence what went wrong the previous night when the window of the bac-111 had been replaced we went through the whole chain of events that had occurred and we found that there was something like 13 of different anomalies which led to the fitting of the bolts and had any of these caused him to think the sequence of events would not have continued and it wouldn't have been an accident [Music] the engineer had come early into his shift and at about 4am had gone to work removing the old windscreen from the plane the hangar was full and the plane had been pushed against the hangar door which made the windscreen hard to reach stretched across the fuselage he had problems controlling his screwdriver [Music] the windscreen that he had taken out had itself been fitted with the wrong length bolts but they were still strong enough to hold the screen in and it survived without a hitch for four years but he was a conscientious engineer and he decided that he would replace the old bolts with new ones when he installed the new screen [Music] he chose not to go to the parts catalog and look up the exact bolts he needed instead he went straight to the parts store good morning good morning there he matched by eye new bolts with the ones he had taken out of the screen his eye match was good and he found a few fresh bolts of exactly the same type in a draw [Music] uh what i'm after is i need 97 days i'm just doing a windscreen on a 111 over there and i need some new bolts eight days on the one eleven well no these are seven this is a seven i've just taken it out we haven't got any sevens anyway okay the store manager knew which bolts the engineer should have been looking for but the engineer chose to ignore his advice instead he drove to the other side of the airport to find a match for his bolts it was now about 5 15 am and in a dark corner of the hangar he continued to search for new bolts identical to the ones he'd taken out of the plane but in the gloom his luck finally ran out he thought they matched but they didn't he picked bolts that were just over two hundredths of an inch too narrow for the job returning to the 111 he stretched over the plane and began fitting these new bolts working at an angle he couldn't see that the new bolts didn't fit correctly [Music] signing off at 6am the engineer had managed to get his work done in time the plane was now ready to be handed over to captain lancaster and his crew in fact it was a disaster waiting to happen the morning of the next day the 111 was at 17 300 feet the difference in pressure between the sealed hull of the jet and the thin atmosphere was climbing quickly to the half ton per square foot it would reach at 35 000 feet this pressure was looking for a weakness and it found it for culling finding out what had happened that night is only the first step no one had hidden from him what they'd done but he knows that he has to go deeper to understand the reasons behind this horrific sequence of events why the engineer did what he did and whether this was an isolated incident or the symptom of a bigger problem accident investigation certainly on aircraft comprises two parts the first part is what's happened and and that's usually relatively easy bit and the second part is why did it happen why did the engineer ignore procedure bypass the technical manuals and ignore helpful advice culling's search for the answers was in its own way revolutionary if we talk to people without giving them a warning um we felt we'd get more information because they'd be freer to discuss it if we gave them a formal caution as it were we thought that they would dry up coffee oh this place is great how's the journey in oh well usual stuff they decide to talk to the engineer well away from the hangar in a cozy hotel room well thanks for coming in to gain insight into the methods of the maintenance engineers culling then does something no one had done before he brings in a behavioral psychologist so is the aircraft normally in the hangar when you're doing that psychologists have been used before to analyze why pilots make mistakes under pressure it's a discipline called human factors but in 1990 using human factors in engineering was unheard of i wanted a professional slant on what is really psychological territory i would hope that as far as the shift maintenance management is concerned that it gave him extra confidence that we were trying to be even-handed and we were trying to get to the bottom of it you know the parts catalogue um uh when you uh when you're getting the volts out um do you go straight to the past catalog or do you just sort of um not usually right no i if i've got a set of screws i'll do the same screws i just go get them up out of the carousel right you you find it easier to do it visually it was in that case easier to do it visually from the bolts you take now yeah yeah because the same bolts that come out the same ones go back in so yeah same size bolts there's no difference and if it worked before it must be the right bulge yeah just replacing like with like really yeah because it had been flying we were somewhat horrified that they had that they admitted those things to us because after all we were officially inverted commerce and they were quite proud of them we would have thought that had they used such practices they they would have get very quiet about it if i'd had to go check with the computers what bolts i needed and what parts and how to fit the thing then there was good chance they wouldn't have been flying at the time it was meant to be good good so when you're doing the job now you're an experienced engineer it might not be by the book or the time like you would train somebody who was new no we've been doing these things for years calling was stunned by what he was hearing but there were more revelations to come the engineers dangerous approach was becoming clearer by the minute you trusted your own knowledge better than the store supervisor's knowledge well i'm an engineer i got 7d bolts out so i put 7d bulbs back in this no problem with that it's that simple so you trusted that the aircraft had been flying so therefore they must have been the right bolts uh yeah that that aircraft had done lots of hours with that windscreen their whole aim was to expedite work through the through their station they had a lot of work coming it was all done at night and in many cases they had more work than they could reasonably handle and they had devised little stratagems to to get around that culling and the psychologist's insights made their way into the first draft of the report it said that there were systemic faults in the maintenance procedure in birmingham but under pressure from british airways lawyers and because they hadn't carried out their investigation following normal procedure the final report was forced to change its emphasis our buyout i mean the treasury solicitor or whoever was advising the branch um confirmed that uh under natural law it was it was unfair to use that information because we hadn't gone through the whole procedure and so we we had to remove that from the report the investigators had never produced an accident report like it working with the psychologist culling developed a completely novel way of using human factors to explain why this accident happened they uncovered pressures in the hangar that caused an otherwise proficient engineer to make potentially lethal mistakes whilst being certain he was doing the right thing this psychological approach took air accident prevention to a new level [Music] through the sheer skill of the crew of ba 5390 as well as a small measure of luck 87 people are now still alive as a consequence of this investigation others may never have to go through the same ordeal in the aftermath of the accident the crew were treated as heroes they received numerous awards and aleister racherson received the coveted gold medal for airman's ship their colleagues also showed what they felt one of the most moving things was to go back to birmingham as we walked into the airport the whole of the airport stopped and all the ground staff and all the checking girls and all that just stood and applauded as we walked through the building and it was it was really quite you know moving at the time you sort of wanted to get out of the way so that you could sort of you know i don't really want to do this like walking up the red carpet sort of thing their colleagues were applauding a team which had demonstrated the highest form of professionalism at every level a cabin crew which worked as a team in extraordinary circumstances and the co-pilot an outsider who took control and worked alone to bring them all safely down to earth each of the crew dealt with their experience in different ways tim lancaster began flying again with ba just five months after the accident he's retired from ba but loves flying so much he's now with another airliner special day when the first day i flew it i decided you know that was what i was going to do i was going to make an effort to go back to work and get better so having made the decision the rest was easy for nigel the man who ran to tim's aid and held onto him for dear life the impact of that day was far more profound i think about it every day and that is the truth i think about it every single day in one form and another yeah every single day uh it will affect me till the end of my days nigel along with simon and sue no longer fly but john heward is still with british airways as a chief steward but even he isn't free of the memories of that day they were bringing in a another british aerospace airplane to where i worked in birmingham and unfortunately that window was fitted from the outside and the layout of the cabin was identical and when i sat on it it all came back to you but for that reason i've gone back to work at heathrow and fly long-haul flights again because those aeroplanes have got no resemblance to the 111 at all alastair atchison who is still flying for british airways chose not to take part in this film for each of the crew the experience will stay with them in different ways but common to them all is that on that day their numbers did not come up tim explained it very well actually and he said our names were on the page but we went to the top and i think that was you know probably [Music] true [Music] you

Channel: Wonder

Views: 3,000,144

Rating: 4.8703833 out of 5

Keywords: Wonder, wonder channel, survivial videos, survival stories, i shouldn't be alive, wonder i shouldn't be alive, outdoor channel, extreme documentary, air crash investigation, air crash investigation 2020, seconds from disaster, mayday, mayday plane crash, plane crash doc, plane crash documentary, plane crash documentary 2020, plane crash disaster, plane crash investigation, British Airways Flight 5390, Flight 5390, pilot sucked out of plane, pilot sucked out of cockpit

Id: 6SI2V_DbCTw

Length: 51min 46sec (3106 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LusphurStarLine778]

yes mistakes do happen

[u/LusphurStarLine778]

the gate C7 L6B ?LS? ?L 6 pointed star X8 ???? vary interesting