2023-12-27 04:37:00
That Lancaster could speak seemed like a miracle because the episode he had unintentionally participated in just 24 hours before must have killed him.
“I remember there was a ‘bang’ and the window disappeared. I was immediately sucked in. My first thought was that I had to try to keep breathing. I didn’t feel any pain while everything was happening, but I remember the wind hit and I guess after I fainted,” captain Tim Lancaster said the next day from a hospital bed in Southampton, on the south coast of England.
That Lancaster could speak seemed like a miracle because the episode he had unintentionally participated in just 24 hours before must have killed him. So much so that, if the journalists who interviewed him in the hospital had only been told the story, it is most likely that they would have dismissed it as incredible, worthy of the script of a bad catastrophe film product.
But Captain Lancaster, a 42-year-old airline pilot, was there, in front of them, with a couple of fractures in his arm, a broken finger and a bare torso that showed a veritable map of reddish bruises that would inevitably turn purple.
Too little damage for a man who spent more than twenty minutes with the upper half of his body outside the windshield of a plane flying at five thousand meters, exposed to a temperature of 17 degrees below zero and a wind that threatened to break him. complete, like a tree broken by a storm.
However, he had survived to tell in first person one of the most unusual episodes in the history of commercial aviation.
British Airways flight 5390 took off at 7:20 a.m. on June 10, 1990 from Birmingham Airport, Great Britain, bound for Malaga.
Britsih Airways flight 5390 took off at 7:20 in the morning on June 10, 1990 from Birmingham Airport, Great Britain, bound for Malaga. The plane, a BAC 1-11, in charge of Captain Tim Lancaster, carried 6 crew members and 81 passengers, almost all vacationers who had planned to spend their vacations on the coasts of the Spanish Mediterranean.
It was a flight of approximately three hours, one that Lancaster and his crew had done hundreds of times. The plane took about ten minutes to reach cruising altitude, at 5,000 meters, when the captain notified the flight attendants that they could begin distributing the breakfast service.
One of the flight attendants, Nigel Odgen, was standing inside the cockpit with two cups of tea he had poured for the captain and his co-pilot, Alastair Atchison, when he was surprised by what he believed was a bomb explosion.
It took him a few seconds to understand what was happening. “I turned around and saw that the windshield was gone and Tim, the pilot, was climbing out of it. He had taken him out of his seat belt and all he could see were his legs,” he told a journalist from the Sidney Morning Herald the next day.
Odgen reacted quickly: “I jumped over the control column and grabbed him by the waist to prevent him from leaving completely. Everything was being sucked out of the plane. Even an oxygen bottle that had been screwed flew and almost took my head off,” he said.
Another who had reflexes in that vertigo situation was co-pilot Atchison who took command of the plane and began to ask for help over the radio. Lancaster had disconnected the autopilot and the plane was going at an unprecedented speed for being in one of the most congested areas of the sky in the world.
This is how the plane landed with Lancaster hanging outside the aircraft
“All I can remember is looking at Alistair Atchison, the co-pilot, struggling to control the plane and shouting Mayday! May Day! on the radio,” Ogden continued.
The door that separated the pilot’s cabin from the passenger cabin also detached and an icy wind swept through the passenger seats with a force full of terror.
Captain Lancaster was still half his body outside the plane, with Odgen holding him tightly by the belt so that the suction caused by the uncontrolled decompression of the cabin would carry him away.
Despite the speed they had to react, the co-pilot and the flight attendant took a few seconds longer to understand that what was happening was due to the detachment of one of the cabin’s side windshields.
The decompression, in addition to sucking Lancaster in, had torn a fire extinguisher from the wall and sent loose objects flying. Two other attendants, John Heward and Simon Rogers, entered the cabin and attempted to secure the items. They couldn’t see much, because the supersaturation of the air had caused a dense fog inside the cabin.
The decompression, in addition to sucking Lancaster in, had torn a fire extinguisher from the wall and sent loose objects flying.
Odgen was still holding Captain Lancaster by the belt, not knowing if he was dead or alive. He did not want to let go of him in any way, not only because he might still be alive but because if he flew away his body could hit the wing of the plane and make the aircraft fall with all the passengers towards certain death.
“My arms were getting weak and my hands felt cold. Then she slipped. I thought I was going to lose him, but he ended up bending in a U shape around the windows. His face was hitting the window and blood was coming out of his nose and the side of his head, his arms were flailing. The most terrifying thing was that his eyes were wide open. I will never be able to forget that,” Ogden said.
When his hands began to freeze, he screamed for help. Rogers heard him and practically darted across the cabin to replace him. He first tied himself to a seat, then hooked the captain’s feet and held him by the ankles.
With 380-mile-per-hour winds battering Lancaster’s body against the side of the plane, Rogers was sure the captain was dead, but he still wasn’t going to let him go.
The pressure and lack of oxygen also conspired against the possibility of thinking clearly, but co-pilot Atchins displayed enormous composure at that moment. Even if Lancaster was dead, his own life, the lives of the crew and the passengers were at stake.
This is how the plane was left with the blood marks of the pilot who was miraculously saved
The first thing he did was descend to an altitude that would provide Lancaster with oxygen, because if he was still alive at 5,000 meters he would die of suffocation or freezing. Once he was able to stabilize the plane, he began making emergency calls, and the nearest airport was able to allow him to make an emergency landing.
They told him to go to Southampton airport, from whose control tower – once the co-pilot described the unusual situation – they opened a runway for him.
Before beginning the descent to the runway, Atchins instructed Rogers and Heward to hold on to Lancaster tighter than ever, because the impact of the landing gear against the runway was going to be very strong. Everyone prayed that he was still alive.
The plane touched down and taxied along the asphalt until it stopped, while two ambulances sounded their sirens and headed towards it.
Exactly 22 minutes had passed since the cabin window had come loose.
“The pressure on Alistair must have been tremendous, everyone’s lives were in his hands. But he descended that plane perfectly,” assessed assistant Ogden.
When they were finally able to pull Lancaster’s body into the cabin, they found that he was still breathing, although he was unconscious.
The investigation of the window accident was carried out by the Air Accident Investigation branch of the British Department of Transport, which determined that faulty maintenance of the windshield, carried out 27 hours before the plane took off, had caused it to detach in mid-flight.
Lancaster regained consciousness shortly after arriving at Southtampon General Hospital. The medical report given to the press indicated that he had “broken bones in his right arm and wrist, a broken left thumb, bruising, frostbite and shock” (Rob Hodginks)
It was proven that when the windshield was installed 27 hours before the flight, 84 of the bolts used had a diameter of 0.026 inches, just over half a millimeter, one size smaller than specified, and that another six had the correct diameter but were shorter than those that should be used.
In reality, it was a series of errors caused by negligence. The previous windshield had also been fitted with incorrect bolts, so when the maintenance manager on duty came to replace the bolts, he simply did it in a similar manner, without consulting the official maintenance documentation. In other words, the accident could have occurred earlier, because the plane was flying with the windshield poorly secured.
When questioned, the British Airways maintenance manager said that he had replaced the screws with similar ones, without consulting the manual, because time was of the essence and he assumed that the previous ones were correct.
Lancaster regained consciousness shortly after arriving at Southtampon General Hospital. The medical report given to the press indicated that she had “bone fractures in the right arm and wrist, a fracture of the left thumb, bruising, frostbite and shock.”
The next day, the pilot felt recovered and in good spirits. Thus he received a small group of journalists, who settled around his bed in the hospital. Happy to have saved their lives, he tried to reconstruct for them what he remembered of the accident.
“I remember hearing a ‘bang’ and seeing the windshield sticking out of the aircraft and then it disappeared like a bullet into the distance. She was conscious of having gone upwards. Everything became surreal. I remember being outside the plane, but that didn’t bother me that much. What I remember most is that I couldn’t breathe because the air current wouldn’t let me. I turned around and could breathe. I also remember that I saw the tail of the plane, the engine, and then I don’t remember anything else. My memory stopped at that moment,” the > network reproduced.
The crew of British Airways Flight 5390 were recognized by Queen Elizabeth II for their valuable service in the air, while the co-pilot received the Polaris Award, the highest award associated with civil aviation, awarded by the International Federation of Airline Pilots Associations, in recognition of their skill and heroism.
Captain Tim Lancaster recovered from his injuries and never thought about stopping flying. Five and a half months after the accident he returned to sit in front of the controls of a passenger plane. He retired from British Airways in 2003 and flew with EasyJet until he retired in 2008, a commercial aviation legend.
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