Pilot sucked out of plane...and survives!!!!

[Kell]

Hello

I know the subject sounds really scary (rightly so!) but, I watched an amazing documentary about this! It was a British Airways flight and the captain was sucked out of the window when one of the cock pit windows blew out. Despite a terrifying scenario, it was quite reassuring to see that the broken window didn't have any major impact on the plane's performance and the co pilot was able to land the plane safely, with the pilot still alive! I always thought that if a plane had even a tiny hole in it, everyone would be sucked out - like you see on the movies! The accident investigation team uncovered that the window had been replaced on the plane the day before and the engineer had used the wrong sized bolts. I am sure that important lessons were learned from this, but I wondered if you knew anymore about the maintenance side of things? I fly in July and I am soooooo not sure about sitting near the window now!!

Thanks
Kelly

[Unregistered]

Hi again Kell,

I had the same feeling about sitting in front of the engines. I had watched a docu about a flight where part of the fuselage came away from the main body of the plane and well...you can guess the rest.

Anyway the secret is DONT WATCH ANY MORE AIRCRASH DOCU'S! They are one in a million flights. If you feel it will help, keep your seatbelt on. And dont forget that the plane you are sitting on will have probably flown that day already or at least the day before.

On the flight you watched, everyone survived. That is the key thing to remember. The pilots are so highly trained they can deal with almost everything - including windows blowing out. It was a great docu though - i watched it too! But then again, i dont have a flight coming up {sob}.

Daisy xx

[kallieb]

Hi Kell,

My two cents to add would be - When did this happen?

My guess is that it was some time ago. But even if it were recent, one thing I have learned is that anytime something terrible happens, much is learned and appropriate changes made. The chances are if you hear of something terrible happening the odds are quite high that it will likely never happen again because the airline industry will take the steps to prevent this.

Always remember that air travel is a business. It is a for-profit industry. It is not there to serve as a whimsy for someone with more money than brains. How this is relevant is if airline travel was approached with a deep recklessness than the safety record would indicate that. If crashes were happening right left and center you could bet that most level-headed people who DON'T have a fear of flying would avoid air travel like the plague.

I don't know if this logic makes sense. But I am definately developing more trust in the industry just for the simple fact that if the airline industry was 'killing off' all their customers willy-nilly, well good luck finding new fools to fly!

[Falcon]

OK this was a long time ago on a BAC1-11. They don't make windows like that any more. The Captain was BLOODY lucky as his feet got caught on the MCP so that after the copilot descended the stewards were able to get into the flight deck (they had to kick the door in as it was warped by the decompression) and grab the Captains legs. They were convinced he was dead and the only reason they hung on was to stop his body being ingested into an engine. He made a full recovery and is now a Captain in Easyjet.

[Daisy]

Does he get paid extra for being Captain Superman? ;) :rolling:

[Kell]

Thanks for all your replies. To be honest, I thought the documentary was quite reassuring - he landed the "broken" plane, everyone was fine and the Captain survived! I suppose I just needed the reassurance that they will have learned from this and that it is very unlikely that it would happen again.
As a rule I don't watch air accident documentaries as I don't need anything to make me more nervous, but I just couldn't stop watching this one as it was so unbelievable.

[Falcon]

The learning came in the engineering depertment. As they had so much work to do they got into the habit of not looking in the manuals for the correct part number. This was before CRM was even thought of and the CAA to their credit were more interested in finding out why this happened than nailing people.