On the morning of 10 June 1990, British Airways Flight 5390 was climbing through 17,300 feet over the Cotswolds, on its way from Birmingham to Málaga. The aircraft was a BAC One-Eleven 528FL, the cabin crew were serving breakfast, and in the cockpit Captain Tim Lancaster had just unfastened his shoulder harness to make himself more comfortable. Co-pilot Alastair Atchison was monitoring instruments. The cabin pressure system had just stabilised. It was a routine Sunday morning charter departure.

At 0733 local time, the entire left-hand cockpit windscreen detached from the aircraft. The decompression pulled Tim Lancaster out of the cockpit, through the opening, and laid him backwards along the top of the fuselage with his shoulders against the front of the cabin roof and his legs trapped over the control column. He was still attached to the aircraft. He was, by the time anyone in the cockpit had registered what had happened, almost certainly unconscious. The airliner was now flying itself, autopilot off, with a half-decapitated cockpit and a man trapped face-down against the airframe at 320 knots.

The half-second that broke the windscreen

The British Aircraft Corporation One-Eleven was a 1960s narrow-body airliner of straightforward design. Its cockpit windscreens were retained from the outside, with the bolts installed under the windscreen frame, so that air pressure during flight would push the windscreen against the airframe rather than blow it out. This is the standard design philosophy for any pressurised cockpit. The retaining bolts had to be exactly the right size. If they were too small, the windscreen would lift off the frame.

Twenty-seven hours before Flight 5390 departed Birmingham, a night-shift Birmingham International Airport maintenance technician had replaced the left-hand cockpit windscreen during an overnight check. He had used a torque wrench to fit 90 retaining bolts. He had taken the bolts from the same parts bin as the maintenance technician who had fitted the windscreen the time before — and the time before that. The bolts in the bin were of the wrong specification. 84 of the 90 bolts he installed were 0.026 inches too small in diameter. They held the windscreen in place on the ground. They could not hold it against 4.8 pounds per square inch of cabin overpressure at 17,300 feet.

The 22-minute fight

What followed in the cockpit of G-BJRT is one of the most extraordinary single feats of aircrew performance in the history of commercial aviation. Senior flight attendant Nigel Ogden, who had been on the flight deck pouring coffee, lunged forward as Captain Lancaster was pulled through the window. Ogden caught the captain by the belt and held him, both hands gripping Lancaster’s trousers, while flight attendant Simon Rogers replaced his hold as the captain’s body went limp in the slipstream. Lancaster’s face slammed repeatedly into the side window of the aircraft — at speeds in excess of 320 knots in -17 °C air.

Co-pilot Alastair Atchison, alone at the controls in the partially destroyed cockpit, with paperwork from the centre console flying around him in the depressurised cabin, declared a mayday at 0734 and began an emergency descent. He had to convince three different air traffic controllers — at Birmingham, London, and Solent — to vector him to Southampton, which had a much shorter runway than Heathrow but was the nearest field he could reach. He could not hear most of their replies because the slipstream noise made radio communication almost impossible. He flew the descent and approach on instruments alone, in cloud, with the captain’s body sliding around the windscreen frame in the airflow above his head.

The landing

G-BJRT touched down at Southampton at 0755 — twenty-two minutes after the windscreen blew out. Ogden, Rogers, and a third flight attendant who had taken over from Ogden when his hand froze, held Tim Lancaster’s body against the fuselage for the entire descent and approach. They could not pull him back inside the aircraft against the slipstream, and they did not let go. When the aircraft stopped on the runway, Lancaster was still attached to it.

The captain had survived three things that should each have killed him. He had survived the decompression. He had survived the slipstream battering — he had fractures in his right arm, left thumb, and right wrist, and frostbite in his face and hands. And he had survived the 22 minutes of cabin staff holding him in place at the boundary of consciousness. He was treated at Southampton General Hospital for his injuries, was discharged within weeks, and returned to British Airways flight operations within five months. He retired from BA in 2008. He died in 2021.

“The proximate cause of the accident was the failure of the windscreen retaining bolts. The root cause was a chronic absence of formal verification procedure during overnight maintenance — a single technician selected bolts from an unsorted parts bin without cross-checking part numbers against the maintenance specification.”

Air Accidents Investigation Branch — Aircraft Accident Report 1/92 — British Airways Flight 5390

What changed

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch published its formal report in March 1992. Beyond the immediate cause — the wrong bolts — the AAIB identified institutional failures in night-shift maintenance procedures at British Airways line maintenance. The technician who had fitted the windscreen had been working alone, without a second pair of eyes, at the end of an extended shift. The parts bin he had selected the bolts from contained mixed specifications. The maintenance card he had been working from did not require cross-checking of bolt diameters against specification.

The recommendations of AAIB Report 1/92 were adopted by every major UK airline within eighteen months. Two-person sign-off on safety-critical maintenance tasks became standard. Parts bins were segregated and labelled by part number. Maintenance cards now require explicit cross-checking of fastener specifications. The accident has since been studied as a case in human-factors engineering, in maintenance procedural design, and in cabin-crew emergency response. The captain who was pulled out of the windscreen wrote a brief account of the incident in his retirement. He titled it, simply, “Held.”

Sources: UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch Report 1/92, Smithsonian Channel Air Disasters, AeroTime, Wikipedia.