Ooooh, you had to throw down the gauntlet...
Battle for Life at 35,000 Feet
By Caroline Davies and Sean O'Neill
The Daily Telegraph - 30th December 2000A BRITISH Airways jumbo jet, with 398 people on board, came within seconds of plummeting to earth yesterday after a deranged passenger burst into the cockpit and tried to seize the controls.
The airliner, flying from Gatwick to Nairobi, dived two miles from 35,000 feet as the crew fought with the man. They eventually overpowered the 27-year-old Kenyan with the help of passengers and tied him to a seat.
During the two-minute struggle the autopilot was disengaged, causing the Boeing 747-400 to spiral downwards. The cabin lights went out and screaming passengers were thrown against the walls and ceiling as the jet twice went into nosedives. The pilot, Capt William Hagan, 53, said afterwards over the tannoy: "A very nasty man has just tried to kill us all."
Among the terrified passengers were Jemima Khan, her children, mother and brother Benjamin Goldsmith, and the pop star Bryan Ferry and his family. A passenger threw himself at the controls of their British Airways jet.
As the Boeing 747-400 plunged two miles in a matter of seconds, Benjamin, son of the late Sir James Goldsmith, gripped the hand of his mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, and said: "We're going to die. We're going to die."
Nearby was his sister, Jemima Khan, 26, wife of the former cricketer Imran Khan. "She had her two little boys clinging round her neck and she was saying, 'Please, please, please, don't let us die. Please, please.'
"There were people hysterically crying, people being sick, shrieks coming from the back of the plane. Grown men were screaming, which was a horrific noise if you've never heard it before. I can't believe there was a single passenger on that plane who did not believe we were going to crash."
Bryan Ferry, former lead singer of the Seventies pop group Roxy Music, was seated in the upper section, next to the cockpit with his wife Lucy and three of his sons, Isaac, Tara and Merlin. Isaac, 15, had noticed the tall, muscular Kenyan man who walked from the economy section up into the business class cabin. His attention was caught by the man's peculiar behaviour.
He said later: "He was holding a prayer book. He seemed to be delirious, talking away to himself. He walked up the aisle towards the cockpit and was hanging around the toilets." But Mr Goldsmith and the rest of the passengers below were unaware that the 27-year-old man had entered the cockpit through an unlocked door.
He threw himself at the jet's controls, knocking out the autopilot, in a desperate suicide attempt. As the struggle between the man and the crew spilled out of the cockpit and into the upper club class section, the plane dived, then lurched, then dived again as the crew wrested back control of the craft and three passengers helped to restrain the man.
Mr Goldsmith said: "All we knew was that we woke to hear these shrieks. Everyone was screaming. The plane was in a nosedive, literally. We all thought it was curtains. They managed to pull the plane out of the dive, and it lurched back up again. The engines were making shrieking noises.
"Suddenly there was a violent stall and the whole plane was shuddering. Then it went into another dive. There was silence except for the emergency alarms and the seat belt signs going on and off, ding dong, ding dong, ding dong.
"It lurched to the left, and that was it. We knew we were really low down. We saw the ground coming up at us steeply, and everything was pouring down to the front of the plane - people, luggage, everything. One of the stewardesses smashed her ankle as she fell down really roughly to the front of the plane."
Mr Goldsmith said: "My sister was sitting there with her two little boys, absolutely terrified. My mother was sitting by my side. I said to her, 'We're going to die, we're going to die. Goodbye'. We really thought this was it. The lights went out. The oxygen masks had dropped. Then the plane gave another lurch, like a rollercoaster, a kind of weightless rolling forward.
"It was pretty touch and go. But we somehow got back into the upper position and we bumped back above the clouds and evened out. The pilot came on to the tannoy, totally out of breath, and said, 'A very nasty man has just tried to kill us all, but the plane is all right now'.
"Then the lights came back on. Everyone was hugging each other. It's all a bit of a haze now. It seemed so surreal at the time. I had mentally prepared myself that I was going to die. I have never been so terrified in all my life.
"The pilot came on later and said five or six seconds more and the plane would have tilted on to its back and blown up, so we were literally seconds from death. Bryan Ferry and his family were up on top, so they had a better idea of what was going on. Isaac managed to videotape some of it."...
Later, Mrs Khan said: "It was terrifying. The plane stalled, it went down 10,000ft and then it went down again. When it lurched up again, I thought, 'Oh God, don't prolong it'. I have always been afraid of flying and, I thought, this is it, my worst nightmare, this is the death I fear most."-- The Daily Telegraph - 30th December 2000
