Ep. 10
On 10 June 1990, British Airways Flight 5390 departed Birmingham for Malaga with a catastrophic flaw: a cockpit windscreen secured with the wrong bolts. Thirteen minutes into the flight, the panel blew out at 23,000 feet, dragging Captain Tim Lancaster headfirst through the opening. Flight attendant Nigel Ogden grabbed his legs and held on through 500-mile-per-hour winds and sub-zero temperatures, whilst co-pilot Alastair Atchison executed an emergency landing at Southampton with a captain dangling outside the aircraft. All 81 people aboard survived. The episode also marks the 1935 founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, when Dr Bob Smith took his last drink in Akron, Ohio, and recalls Kevin Warwick’s 2002 neural communication experiment and fifteen-year-old Joe Nuxhall’s chaotic 1944 baseball debut. A day of extraordinary human resilience in the face of impossible circumstances.
