Image of pilot hanging out window captures heroic story 30 years on

Thirty years after the incident on BA Flight 5390 images have resurfaced online, reviving memories of one of the strangest and most heroic chapters in civil aviation.

A striking photo of a distressed pilot hanging from the window of his BAC 1-11 has gone viral online. As his co-pilot holds doggedly onto his ankles, both men seem desperate for the flight to land.

Online pundits and meme-artists commented on how this oddity from the archives captures the current mood of aviation perfectly.

Of course the image is fake. It is a still taken from a 2005 TV show – however the story it depicts is true and even more extraordinary.

Photos of the real BA plane crew and captain convalescing in hospital soon followed, grounding the bizarre image in fact.

Flight 5390 is one of the most storied and remarkable near-misses in British Airway’s history. Most remarkable perhaps is how all those onboard the flight in June 1990, lived to tell the tale:

It was 27 minutes into the flight from Birmingham to Malaga, Spain, somewhere over the English Midlands two of the cockpit windows smashed, depressurising the cabin.
Captain Tim Lancaster who was at the controls was instantly sucked out of the cockpit.

In interviews with the cabin crew, they described the chaos that followed. Exposed to the rushing wind and pressure difference at 7000m altitude the cockpit door was ripped off its hinges.

Remarkably one quick thinking flight attendant, Nigel Ogden, was able to grab his captain’s ankles, before he disappeared out the 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 later in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.

Ogden was hailed a hero for his actions. Without his quick reactions the pilot likely would have been lost out the window and, a greater danger still, they avoided the grim risk of the captain being caught by the engines – causing the entire plane to be lost.

“I jumped over the control column and grabbed him round his waist to avoid him going out completely.