Eighty-Four Wrong Bolts

Blown Out at Seventeen Thousand Feet

Mara: June 10th, 1990. British Airways Flight 5390, a BAC One-Eleven, climbs out of Birmingham for Malaga with 81 passengers on board. Captain Tim Lancaster and his co-pilot, Alistair Atchison, are flying it. Thirteen minutes after takeoff, over Didcot in Oxfordshire, the windscreen in front of the captain blows out and shatters. The UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch, in its report, describes the result as a pilot being 'partially pulled through the open frame.'

Eli: And that's the picture someone saw going around online. The listener who sent it asked for the full story behind this. Why he did this. How he survived. And are there more stories like this? It's Saturday, October 10th, and today's angle is a pilot pinned outside his own plane.

Mara: People inside holding on. Getting to why he's out there starts with the glass in front of him.

Eli: That windscreen was fitted from the outside, not plugged in from the inside.

Mara: Investigators put the moment at 7:33 in the morning, at 17,300 feet. An explosive decompression tears through the flight deck. The cockpit door blows off. Lancaster is pinned against the outside of the fuselage, while his crew fight to keep him from being blown away.

Eli: Investigators timed that decompression at between one and one and a half seconds. That's all it took to put the captain outside his own airliner, at a height where it's hard to see how anyone comes back.

The Human Chain

Mara: Back on the flight deck, Lancaster's legs have caught on the flight controls, jammed forward, and that's knocked off the autopilot. The jet starts to dive. A flight attendant, Nigel Ogden, had been in the cockpit serving hot drinks to the crew. In his words, 'I jumped over the control column and grabbed him round his waist to avoid him going out completely.'

Eli: The control stick that steers the plane. Ogden said the fallen door was resting on the controls too, sending them down.

Mara: Outside, Lancaster has a problem of his own. Years later he described it: 'I couldn't breathe because I was facing into the airflow. And I turned my body round and I was looking back along the top of the aircraft.'

Eli: So turning his back to the wind is what let him breathe at all.

Mara: Then Ogden starts to tire. 'I was still holding Tim, but my arms were getting weaker, and then he slipped. I thought I was going to lose him, but he ended up bent in a U-shape around the windows.' Ogden was being pulled out too. Another steward grabbed his trouser belt to stop him and wrapped the captain's shoulder strap around him. A third crew member sat in a pilot's seat, buckled the seatbelt, and held on with all his strength. One chain of people, anchored to a seat.

Eli: And Ogden could see his face against the window, bleeding from nose and head.

Mara: His eyes were wide open. The crew thought he might already be dead. At one point a crew member said, 'We're going to have to let him go.'

Eli: They didn't, and it wasn't only loyalty. Letting go risked his body being sucked into an engine or striking a wing. That could have brought the whole jet down.

Mara: What nobody on that flight deck knew yet was why a captain was out there at all. Eli, that starts with the glass.

The Wrong Bolts

Eli: It does. With a windscreen fitted from outside, the bolts carry the load. And this one had been replaced before the flight. Within days, a Civil Aviation Authority official said, 'Investigators have determined that of the 90 bolts used to retain the windscreen, 84 were of an incorrect size for the captive nuts into which they were installed.'

Mara: The fixed nuts that hold the bolts. Nearly all of them. And up there, the air inside is pushing outward on that glass the whole time. Once the bolts give, the cabin's air rushes out through the hole in under two seconds. That's what explosive decompression is.

Eli: A whole pressurised cabin trying to leave through one window.

Mara: And taking everything loose with it. Ogden said even an oxygen bottle that had been bolted down went flying and nearly knocked his head off.

Eli: Then the deeper why. The senior investigator at the Air Accidents Investigation Branch brought in a behavioural psychologist to look at the people behind the mistake. The finding was a maintenance team working under high pressure and fatigue. And no deliberate act by Lancaster. He was flying the plane. That's all.

Mara: Which is the other reading, Eli, the one the post invites. Popular trivia accounts tend to package the cockpit image without the mechanics, so readers are left wondering why the captain did it.

Eli: Whether he's still alive, nobody on board can say. And right now he's still outside, with Atchison flying alone and needing somewhere to land.

Southampton Landing

Mara: Atchison takes the jet down to air people can breathe, and gets on the radio. What he says is: 'Negative sir, the captain is half sucked out of the aeroplane. I understand — I believe he is dead.'

Eli: The crew told investigators they all thought so too, until they saw his feet kicking.

Mara: Several minutes later, as they told it. Then Atchison puts Flight 5390 down at Southampton, a successful emergency landing. Firefighters free Lancaster from the outside of the aircraft. Paramedics have him on a stretcher in the cockpit when Ogden goes in. '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."'

Eli: One account puts him out there about twenty minutes, in freezing, hurricane-force wind.

Mara: And he lived, with broken bones, frostbite, shock and bruising.

Eli: Survivals like that are rare, but not unique.

Mara: Lancaster himself was back flying five months later. Two days after the flight, his son told a Spanish newspaper it was impossible this accident would stop him flying. He stayed with British Airways until 2003, the year he received the Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air, and he flew until he retired in 2008. In 2018, a windshield failed on Sichuan Airlines Flight 8633, an Airbus A319, and the first officer was partially blown out of the cockpit. The first officer survived. That same year, Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 had an explosive decompression, and a passenger partly blown out of the plane died.

Eli: And further back, Vesna Vulović. A Yugoslav flight attendant on JAT Flight 367 in January 1972, when an explosion later linked to a bomb tore the plane apart over Czechoslovakia. She survived the fall.

Mara: Which brings it back to the picture. Dramatic reenactment images of Lancaster being held after he was sucked out of the cockpit have run in British papers credited to the account @mrwtffacts. The image travels. The wrong bolts and the radio call don't travel with it.

Eli: So, why he did this: he didn't. At 7:33 that morning over Didcot, he was flying a jet whose new windscreen was held by the wrong bolts. How he survived: legs snagged on the controls, a face turned out of the wind, a chain of crew, and Atchison's landing.

Mara: Some of it is still open. Lancaster remembered turning his body to breathe, while Ogden believed he'd been in a coma throughout, so accounts differ on how aware he was. The investigators date the flight June 10th, but some newspapers have it as June 20th. And @mrwtffacts has shared several survival posts, so which one the listener first saw is still unknown.

Eli: Dig into explosive decompression.

Mara: And keep following technology with us.

Eli: Thanks for listening. I'm Eli.

Mara: And I'm Mara. Until next time.