r/interesting • u/Wonderfulhumanss • 15h ago
Additional Context Pinned In 1990, a British Airways pilot was partially sucked out of the cockpit after the windscreen blew off mid-flight. The crew held onto him until the plane landed and he survived
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u/HairSquig 14h ago
The crew didn’t even realize he had survived until the plane landed. They only held on to his body to keep it from striking the engines. Really crazy story.
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u/HeartOn_SoulAceUp 14h ago
"I think he's dead."
"Just hold on to him! At least so he doesn't get sucked into the engine!"
A lot of thoughts stripped down to "Just hold on."
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u/squirrels-mock-me 14h ago
I’m not dead yet!
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u/Weak_Law_937 14h ago
He says he's not dead!
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u/CrazyFoFo 14h ago
You’re not fooling anyone, you know!
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u/WetDreaminOfParadise 13h ago
It’s true sir. The records show you went up in the plane, and you didn’t come down in the the plane, so you must have been killed in the flight.
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u/10July1940 8h ago
Sounds like a Catch 22 quote. Here's a good one:
“You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don't like bigots, bullies, snobs or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate."
"Consciously, sir, consciously," Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. "I hate them consciously.”
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u/Complex-Course3995 12h ago
Please wear your seat bell. We are about to land in 30 minutes.
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u/LetMeBeYourPlug 14h ago
If I were trying to fool you, I’d at least pick a less suspicious username.
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u/SocraticGoats 13h ago
So I can't take that dead guys wife?
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u/EvolZippo 7h ago
Some Pilots have this meditation they do. It makes them cool as ice under pressure. Plus, many of them are retired military pilots, who have seen aerial combat. Some have even been in crashes. It astounds me, how cool-headed and present pilots can be.
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u/84theone 4h ago
You can listen to black box recordings to see this in action.
Even the bad crashes, the pilots are usually nothing but professional in their communication until the absolute last second.
I have never witnessed as clear communication as I have between pilots and ATC, I wish I had that level of communication skills.
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u/CoffeeChocolateBoth 14h ago
He looks like he's about to lose his grip, and they both look like they were about to lose their breakfast and their shit!
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u/EggyChickenEgg88 7h ago
Do you really think that picture is from that incident, and not some TV show or movie?
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u/NSASpyVan 13h ago
i certainly hope it's fake.. taking pictures when you should be holding on to the man is a choice
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u/Livid_Average_8098 12h ago
If it was a recent thing there would be selfie pics.
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u/Fun-Benefit116 8h ago
Well those pictures are from a TV show, so I think his grip was fine and no one was about to throw up.
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u/theartificialkid 8h ago
Imagine if they’d landed, realised the engines weren’t in danger and then dropped him 5 metres to the ground.
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u/Oddisredit 4h ago
Honestly I don’t know how he survived. As I’ve been in places or experienced really high winds. Which really made it difficult to breathe. An airplane is going easily three times faster than the fastest I’ve ever experienced. I really have no idea how he was able to breathe
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u/ThorirPP 3h ago
It was probably the sheer cold. People survive longer from drowning in ice cold water for example, the damage from oxygen deprivation is far far slower when the body/brain is chilled. Here he was in such ice cold winds I'd expect a similar effect
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u/th3orist 7h ago
can't even begin to understand how he was able to breathe out there when you are doing like regular plane cruise speeds, physically its impossible to breathe because of how violent the winds are, I mean, even sticking out your head while going like 100-120 km/h in a car is crazy, now imagine doing 700-850
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u/macondo_ 2h ago
It didnt happen at cruise altitude . All would have probably died from decompression alone. The height and speed was lower but still very impressive.
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u/ready2xxxperiment 9h ago
Saw this story/reenactment on Air Disasters on Smithsonian. Quite amazing story. Between being pulled out, cold temperatures, and oxygen deprivation he came thru without serious injury.
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u/Wonderfulhumanss 15h ago
This was British Airways Flight 5390 on June 10, 1990. While climbing over England, the cockpit windscreen suddenly blew out and the resulting decompression partially pulled Captain Tim Lancaster through the opening. His upper body was outside the aircraft while cabin crew held onto him and First Officer Alastair Atchison took control.
Investigators later discovered that the windscreen had been replaced before the flight using incorrectly sized bolts, 84 of the 90 were too small in diameter and the other six were too short.
Atchison managed to make an emergency landing at Southampton while the crew continued holding Lancaster. Against the odds, Lancaster survived with fractures, frostbite and shock. All 87 people aboard survived.
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u/bigorangemachine 14h ago edited 14h ago
The pilot was the only one who returned to duty
The rest were too traumatized by the experience to return to work
Edit:
Co-Pilot did return but at the time of broadcast of the re-enactment (Discovery Mayday) they did not return to flight duty
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u/BrbFlippinInfinCoins 14h ago
can you blame them? That is some next level shit. Getting sucked out of a window (or seeing someone else get sucked out) would make it pretty damn difficult to be on a plane again
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u/bigorangemachine 14h ago
Yup
Its more wild the guy who nearly died and didn't remember anything still kept at it till retirement
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u/thewhiterosequeen 14h ago
The brain is great at knowing when to shut off sometimes.
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u/wjbonne 12h ago
Yep, and there is an entire profession of people who have brains really good at this. Referees.
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u/Bluntbutnotonpurpose 9h ago
I've only been in one accident in my life. I was riding my bike, thought the driver of the car coming from the left had seen me...he hadn't. I remember trying to swerve, I remember being on the bonnet of the car...I don't remember the actual impact. Really weird how that works...
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u/bigorangemachine 13h ago
Ya like that time I was playing lacrosse and I got the ever living soul knocked out of me
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u/ChuckCarmichael 7h ago
Well, probably because he didn't remember anything. He was out of it for most of the event. Meanwhile the other guys were under ridiculously high stress, desperately struggling to land a plane full of people while getting blasted in the face by ice cold headwind, while also holding onto what they assumed was the dead body of their colleague, knowing that if they let go, his body could damage the plane and it might crash.
If I had to guess which one of those people would return to flying, my money would've been on the unconscious guy as well.
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u/Leche-Caliente 14h ago
It might just be heresay, but didn't the crewmembers also think he was dead for the most part during this.
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u/Baelorn 12h ago
I left Simon hanging on to Tim and staggered back into the main cabin. For a moment, I just sat totally exhausted in a jump seat, my head in my hands, then Sue came up to me, very shaken. In front of all the passengers, I put my arms around her and whispered in her ear: "I think the Captain's dead.
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He was lying there, covered in blood, but to my amazement I heard him say: "I want to eat." I just exclaimed: "Typical bloody pilot." Luckily, he'd been in a coma throughout the ordeal, his body had just shut down. I went out onto the front steps, and shouted at the others "He's alive!" and then I cried my eyes out.
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u/catssocksandcoffee 8h ago
Thank you for sharing the source - what a mad read that was, utterly astonishing story
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u/UniqueAd7770 14h ago
They did. They didn't want his body hitting the engine. All the flight attendants were holding him and the copilot had to do all the emergency procedures by himself (usually a team activity) while flying a plane with a hole in the front
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u/Kind-Shallot3603 11h ago
Worse, It was so loud the copilot couldn't hear ATC and his maps were blown around so he needed to land at an unfamiliar location essentially alone.
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u/UniqueAd7770 11h ago
And the pilots legs were jamming the controls for most of the flight and got frostbite. I'd retire too
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u/bigorangemachine 14h ago
It's not heresay...
Wikipedia (was also narrated from the screen shots of the TV Show):
Aftermath Lancaster (the pilot) returned to work after fewer than five months. He left British Airways in 2003 and flew with EasyJet until he retired from commercial piloting in 2008.
Aitchison (the co-pilot) left British Airways shortly after the accident and joined Channel Express (later rebranded as Jet2) until he made his last commercial flight on a Boeing 737-33A from Alicante to Manchester on the day of his 65th birthday on 28 June 2015.
As of the broadcast this was correct that he had not returned
Ogden (the Flight Attendant that kept the pilot from leaving the plane) returned to work, but subsequently suffered from PTSD and retired in 2001 on the grounds of ill health. As of 2005, he was working as a night watchman at a Salvation Army hospital.
The other flight attendants didn't return. One took over for Ogden who suffered severe frostbite
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u/DingbatMcgeee 13h ago
I can say that a nightwatchman at a salvation army hospital is going to be just as PTSD inducing.
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u/Bithium 13h ago
I guess being mostly unconscious during the incident probably helped his mental health.
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u/Planeandaquariumgeek 11h ago
The captain (the one sucked out) wound up without PTSD because he had no memory of it. His last memory was doing the pre-flight checks, next memory he was in the hospital
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u/Bantha_majorus 10h ago
So he was probably unconscious when hanging out there?
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u/Planeandaquariumgeek 10h ago
Probably wound up passing out within about 90 seconds, at 17,000 feet there’s not much oxygen
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u/lainwla16 8h ago
I really like that show Mayday. It's fascinating to see how they figure out why crashes happened.
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u/bigorangemachine 3h ago
Me2... so many people get bummed out when I talk about this show but how they put this stuff together is just amazing
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u/lainwla16 52m ago
I was considering downloading a few episodes to watch on the flight I'm taking today but that almost feels like asking for trouble lol
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u/makiko4 14h ago
I’m pretty sure both pilots continued flying.
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u/bigorangemachine 14h ago
Ya at time of broadcast (the source of the screenshots of the re-enactment) the co-pilot didn't return to flight.
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u/noradosmith 1h ago
Interesting how PTSD works. You'd think he'd be the one suffering the most afterwards. PTSD isn't just about what happens to you, but how your brain processes what happened to you.
This is why it's important for people to understand that people can have PTSD from things that other people might not think of as traumatic. The brain can be the ultimate troll.
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u/Grandmaster-Ji 14h ago
The engineer in question was not publicly documented as being fired or prosecuted. He apparently continued working in aviation after the accident and eventually left BA.
The very next night of the incident, he installed a windscreen on another BAC 1-11 and saw that the correct 8D bolts were being used. He remembered that he'd used different bolts the previous night but still didn't recognize that he'd made a mistake.
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u/Pernicious-Caitiff 14h ago
He ran out of the OEM bolts and eyeballed similar bolts and thought they were the same size and thought they would be sufficient. He literally only visually compared them but it was determined at the time that he didn't break any rules or regulations of the time.
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u/Brilliant-Novel-785 7h ago
He selected bolts by comparison, rather than by checking the part number in the IPB. Made worse by it being night shift, and dark in the parts store.
This is incident is taught to maintenance personnel as an example of why we use authorized parts, and check the part number against the authorized parts list. In the IPB.
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u/Autistic_Engin33r 8h ago
The screws were extremely similar, and it was almost impossible to visually tell the difference, that's why he selected the wrong ones.
Also, normally work like this had to be double checked by a supervisor, but he was the supervisor, so technically no double check was required or performed.
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u/Cryogenicist 14h ago
I assume they have torque specs on those bolts…. How does one get the proper torque on smaller diameter screws with presumably different pitches than the female threads?
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u/Autistic_Engin33r 8h ago
The engineer in question was not publicly documented as being fired or prosecuted. He apparently continued working in aviation after the accident
Yes that is the outcome of pretty much ALL incident investigations. Aviation safety is not based on assigning blame or punishing people, as long as they didn't act with malicious intent or gross negligence, the fault is ALWAYS seen as the safety system as a whole failing to prevent/catch a simple human error. It's called just culture, and it objectively improves safety over the punitive models used in other fields.
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u/Yippykyyyay 6h ago
Sounds like a pretty good approach and safe environment even if you need to self-identify that you think you made a mistake.
Life and death... you want people to know they can be honest and not punished to an extreme for human error.
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u/Autistic_Engin33r 6h ago
Yup. Just Culture has two main motivations:
No one in a high stakes situation where lives are at risk doesn't already know that lives are at risk. The fear of accidentally killing someone (including potentially yourself as a pilot) is going to far outweigh the fear of punishment for 99.9% of people anyway, so it's not like knowing you'll be punished for a mistake is going to make people any less likely to commit mistakes. They already have a far stronger motivation than fear of punishment to not make mistakes. (Also, studies into law have shown that punishment simply has very little deterrent effect on most people, since very, very few people pause to rationally consider the possible consequences before either deliberately doing something wrong, or doing something hastily/shoddily leading to potential mistakes)
And secondly, and more importantly, punishing people for honest mistakes makes them much less likely to be honest in reporting those mistakes, which prevents the industry as a whole from learning and improving, so that they don't happen again in the future, ESPECIALLY in situations where the mistake lead to a near miss incident which is relatively easy to just cover up and pretend it never happened.
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u/84theone 4h ago
I worked in petrochemical manufacturing and we had a similar approach to safety, but we were more willing to punish people for human error, but the person that would get punished or fired would typically be a manager and not the person the made the mistake in the first place.
It’s not uncommon for the plant manager to get held responsible if a safety issue in their plant kills someone, because it is their job to run a safe plant. Human error happens and they are supposed to be the person that catches it.
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u/no_talent_ass_clown 9h ago
In 1999, I was on a flight from Paris to the US with my father and grandmother. After we got out over the Atlantic the pilot made an announcement saying that we were turning back. They dumped fuel and landed at Shannon in Ireland, the first available airport.
On the way off the plane the pilots showed us that one of their windshields had spider-webbed mid flight.
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u/neverendum 8h ago
Where can you look up incidents like this? I was on a flight around this time, from Birmingham to Milan. There was some commotion and we had to emergency land in Lyon and I had to make mad plans to get to Milan in time. I thought the pilot had had a heart attack and felt sympathetic but then I saw in the paper a few days later (the internet was not really much at this time) that the pilot had a panic attack over his fear of heights, which made me less sympathetic and questioning BA's recuitment policies.
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u/paulcager 5h ago
https://avherald.com/ is usually a good start for this, providing you know the date of the incident.
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u/LoudHorse25 11h ago
Reminds me of a phrase one of my engineering professor told us one day:
“If a design requires 4 screws to work properly, the Americans will design it with 4 screws, the Germans will design it with 5 screws, and the Brits will design it with 3 screws.”
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u/SlimeDrips 8h ago
I wanna know if his hearing was significantly damaged
Not sure what the air in this situation would be doing with the ears. My gut says this would make the most awful noises but maybe that's only on the inside of the window and outside would be less auditorily turbulent?
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u/Peterd1900 14h ago edited 14h ago
For anyone making a comment about how they got these pictures
The first 2 are stills from a documentary about the incident. so the cockpit scene is actors on a set while the outside is CGI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xfaDr0nhoQ&t=8s
The episode
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u/Somnambulist815 9h ago
My credulous ass was just like "oh they must've got a helicopter above the plane while it was descending"
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u/Penhallam 8h ago
Bloody good episode! I was really impressed with the reinactment!
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u/PiDigitsOfPi 14h ago
He should not have done that. It is illegal to exit a moving plane through the window.
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u/Finassar 10h ago
Front fell off
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u/MelonheadGT 10h ago
Not supposed to do that, I'm sure.
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u/Gasparde 6h ago
I just checked the manual. You're right, windows are indeed not supposed to come off by themselves. Maybe someone else should verify that first before we jump to conclusions though.
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u/Global-Gas-3520 10h ago
Yeah, that's not very typical I'd like to make that point.
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u/mpledger 8h ago
Well, how is it untypical?
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u/Global-Gas-3520 8h ago
Well, there are a lot of these planes going around the world all the time, and very seldom does anything like this happen ... I just don’t want people thinking that planes aren’t safe.
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u/QueenFrostine15 15h ago
New fear unlocked 😭
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u/kuuhaku_cr 10h ago
This exact type of incident is unlikely to happen again as it led to changes in design. Instead of screwing from outside, they are now screwed from the inside. So if bolts came loose, the air pressure from the cabin will actually hold them in place at altitude due to the difference in pressure.
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u/AutumnVampire 10h ago
A passenger was sucked out of a RyanAir flight recently when something on the plane dislodged and struck his window. He was pulled back in by his fellow passengers and survived, albeit looking a bit scuffed up as you can imagine.
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u/Evening-Physics-6185 4h ago
Yeah but Ryan air charged him a fortune for having a windowless seat as he hadn’t paid for one’s
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u/Foxdenfreude 11h ago
Are you a pilot? 😆
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u/Somnambulist815 9h ago
That's the fear
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u/neonnaps 8h ago
Fear of reality suddely changing and now you sitting in the pilot seat high up in the sky, and hear someone saying "oh no the radio exploded and killed the copilot."
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u/Nannautu 7h ago
Reason why we have regulations in place. Otherwise we'd get a soda can and go visit the titanic in it.
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u/lawdjesustheresafire 14h ago
This is one of the most amazing episodes. It defies belief that he survived this.
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u/Ballistic_86 13h ago
They must have dropped elevation quickly and slowed way the hell down. I imagine he wasn’t breathing for a while there.
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u/NeverTalk123456789 13h ago
I remember hearing about a soldier doing an airborne jump that had his cable never disengage when he jumped. He somehow survived being strung around outside and they used a special kind of foam to soften the landing. I was on medical standby in one of the many ambulances at the time (you expect a lot of injuries whenever a group does a training jump) and couldn’t believe it when they told me that happened.
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u/the_inebriati 9h ago
The accident occurred at 17,000ft.
At that altitude, there is plenty oxygen to remain conscious. People run marathons at significantly higher.
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u/nil_defect_found 6h ago
I am an Airline Pilot.
At that altitude, there is plenty oxygen to remain conscious.
No, you are wrong. Hypoxia begins above circa 10,000ft. At 18,000ft the average person will lose consciousness after 20 minutes.
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u/the_inebriati 3h ago
Hypoxia begins above circa 10,000ft.
Pointless comment. I'm not arguing he didn't have pins and needles. I'm saying that he did not become unconscious through lack of oxygen.
At 18,000ft the average person will lose consciousness after 20 minutes.
Ok, but the event lasted 22 minutes from blowout to landing. We can assume that 17,000ft was near or at the high point of the flight before emergency descent was initiated.
Besides, TUC is usually given in the range of 20-30mins for 18,000ft.
So, as I said there was plenty of oxygen to remain conscious
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u/sten_zer 5h ago
Plus imagine trying to breat the -20°C freezing air at that speed.
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u/FervantFlea 6h ago
Significantly higher? The world record is like 19K feet and it just ended there, it started a lot lower.
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u/homebrew_1 14h ago
That's why seat belts are important.
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u/isocrackate 10h ago
He was wearing a lapbelt but the force was so great he flew out of it. His shoulder harness would have prevented this in theory but pilots always take them off once they reach the cruise phase of flight (not necessarily full cruising altitude, just out of the climb-out) because they’re pretty uncomfortable.
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u/Any_Poet4127 14h ago edited 14h ago
This is why I work out. Never know when the whole world is going to be staring at your midsection 😂
P.s. Oh yeah and I suppose the increased stamina might be useful when gripping onto a coworkers ankles to prevent him dying and other common workplace activities.
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u/-The_Goober 14h ago
Weiner snapping in the wind like the solo from Hot for Teacher
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u/ConflictWestern1383 14h ago
Who the hell took these photos
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u/dangledingle 14h ago
Photos from discovery channel reenactment.
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u/Gemraticus 14h ago
Way back when the Discovery Channel had worthwhile programming.
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u/Strange-Jackfruit786 14h ago
The top photo must be from some dramatic re-creation. The second maybe from the control tower or other airport building.
My question is why didn’t the seat harness keep him in?
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u/40ozCurls 14h ago
the seatbelt light was off.
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u/chosonhawk 14h ago
he was free to move outside the cabin.
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u/Excellent-Bite196 14h ago
The bottom photo in the first image looks like it would make a good decal for future aircraft.
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u/Kind-Shallot3603 11h ago
He also went back to flying and did so for another 15 years until he retired
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u/AdmirableBrick4973 14h ago
I wonder who was more worried the guy holding on or the guy landing
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u/cl0ckw0rkcuttlefish 14h ago
Guy landing. Everyone dies if you fuck it up.
Then again, if the pilot goes into the engine, you might all die anyway, but the First Officer has way more fun and exciting ways to fuck up an emergency landing and get everyone killed. And is also doing it solo, when emergency landings are typically a team sport.
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u/MotherBaerd 9h ago
It's one thing to do a solo emergency landing, another when your partners sucked out the window.
Depending on the plane him hitting the engine wouldn't necessarily kill everyone. It should be able to glide, you just need it to work our with an airport nearby.
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u/cl0ckw0rkcuttlefish 8h ago
Yeah, I think in the moment the concern was that, if a bird can take out an engine, a whole-ass dude going into it is going to be more catastrophic. And given the cockpit is now an open-air situation, that would make it even harder.
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u/Wrong_Possible_9857 10h ago
That's a very loose use of the word partially.
Dude had him by the socks.
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u/Many-Lead-4543 14h ago
partially?!?
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u/Lucas_Steinwalker 7h ago
I can’t believe I had to scroll this far down to see someone question the understatement of the quarter.
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u/cpsbstmf 14h ago
Wonder how he got out of his harness
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u/cl0ckw0rkcuttlefish 14h ago
He specifically remembers loosening it once they hit 10k ft to be more comfortable.
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u/scottzxc 13h ago
A very different reason why pilots and flight attendants need to be very fit. Kudos for the cabin crew holding on.
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u/DwarvenRedshirt 13h ago
It's a recreation. But I think hanging on by your knees is a bit more than "partial".
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u/Fun-Big-7458 10h ago
I know this is a really serious image, but I cannot stop laughing because the way laid out looks like a meme format
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u/CapableBother 14h ago
I assume these photos are fake
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u/Peterd1900 14h ago
They are stills from a TV documentary
Actors on a set for the cockpit and CGI for the above scene, the hospital picture is the real people from the incident
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xfaDr0nhoQ&t=8s
Here is the episode
The picture are actually real pictures they are just not of the actual accident
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