The time a British Airways pilot was sucked out of an airplane mid-flight — and lived

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British Airways pilot Tim Lancaster, center, recovering from his ordeal in a Southampton hospital on June 11, 1990, flanked by the two stewards who helped save him.  AP Photo/Tim Ockenden

In 1990, a British Airways pilot was sucked out of a cockpit window mid-flight.
He spent 20 minutes partially dangling out of the plane as the flight crew held his ankles.
Miraculously, the co-pilot plane landed and the pilot survived.

British Airways Flight 5390 took off without a hitch on June 10, 1990.

But just 13 minutes into the flight from Birmingham, England, to Malaga, Spain, disaster struck.

In an instant, a windscreen panel blew out of the BAC 1-11 aircraft, ripping the flight’s veteran pilot from his seatbelt, sucking him halfway out of the cockpit window, and sending the plane into a nosedive.

But thanks to the quick thinking of the flight crew who grabbed the pilot by his legs and held him for 20 minutes as they landed the plane, everyone — including the captain — survived.

‘He had been sucked out of his seatbelt’

The panel blew as the plane carrying 81 passengers was flying at an altitude of 17,300 feet.

Explosive decompression forced Captain Tim Lancaster head-first out of the cockpit, leaving his upper body pinned against the exterior of the plane and his legs caught in the controls, hurling the jetliner into a dive.

Flight attendant Nigel Ogden quickly jumped into action as Lancaster was launched out of the cockpit window.

“I whipped round and saw the front windscreen had disappeared and Tim, the pilot, was going out through it. He had been sucked out of his seatbelt and all I could see were his legs,” Ogden said in a 2005 piece published in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Ogden recalled: “I jumped over the control column and grabbed him round his waist to avoid him going out completely. His shirt had been pulled off his back and his body was bent upwards, doubled over round the top of the aircraft.”

Ogden said he was holding on to Lancaster “for grim death but I could feel myself being sucked out.” Other flight attendants rushed to help. The pressure made Lancaster weigh “the equivalent of 500 pounds,” according to Ogden, who got frostbite and a dislocated shoulder during the incident.

Co-pilot Alistair Atcheson probably would have been sucked out of the plane too if he hadn’t been still wearing his safety harness from take-off, Ogden said.

The force of the explosion had thrown Lancaster’s legs forward and turned off the autopilot, Ogden told the Morning Herald. The plane roared toward the ground “through some of the most congested skies in the world” at more than 400 miles per hour, he said.

Amid the chaos, Atcheson managed to re-engage the plane’s auto-pilot and get the aircraft down to an altitude where there would be more oxygen.

At one point, Ogden thought he was going to “lose” Lancaster.

“His face was banging against the window with blood coming out of his nose and the side of his head, his arms were flailing … Most terrifyingly, his eyes were wide open. I’ll never forget that sight as long as I live.”

The pilot described what it was like hanging out of the airplane

For Lancaster, then 42 years old, the situation was “completely surreal.”

Years later, the pilot would share his experience on a 2005 episode of the documentary series “Mayday.”

Lancaster said that he was “aware of being outside of the airplane, but that really didn’t bother me a great deal.”

“What I remember most clearly was the fact that I couldn’t breathe because I was facing into the airflow,” he said.

Lancaster said that he remembers trying to position his body so he could breathe better, but he doesn’t remember much else after that.

Lancaster spent the next 20 minutes hanging outside of the plane as crew members desperately held onto his ankles. Finally, Atcheson safely pulled off an emergency landing at England’s Southampton Airport.

Crew members thought Lancaster had died during the mayhem, but against all odds, the pilot survived the horrifying ordeal.

The flight’s captain only had frostbite from the extremely cold, a fractured elbow, thumb, and wrist, as well as some bruising and shock.

A UK government investigation into the incident later revealed that the wrong bolts were used to install the blown-out windshield, which was swapped during routine maintenance 27 hours before the flight took off.

The flight crew who saved Lancaster’s life and the lives of everyone on board were awarded the Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air, a civilian honor in the UK.

The British Airways flight 5390 incident remains one of the most astonishing in the history of aviation. Perhaps even more amazingly, Lancaster was back flying just months later.

He retired in 2008.