The Kegworth air disaster in 1989 killed 47 people and left wreckage strewn across the M1. Despite the catastrophic damage it caused, a remarkable number of passengers survived the tragedy 25 years ago. This is their story.
Chris Thompson is a survivor, pulled unconscious from the mangled remains of British Midland flight 92.
Along with 117 other passengers, he’d sat helpless as the stricken Boeing 737 – having lost both engines – lurched sickeningly and plunged towards a busy motorway.
Months after the crash, when he’d learned to walk again, he somehow managed to summon the courage to get back on a plane.
But he couldn’t fly without alcohol or tranquillisers. And at the check-in desk he was haunted by his knowledge of Flight 92’s seating layout.
Chris refused to travel in certain parts of the cabin. He couldn’t sit in what he called the “dead seats”.
Today, sitting in his seafront home in Northern Ireland, he says he’s managed to conquer most of those fears.
But a quarter of a century after the night which changed his life, the memories are still vivid and his hands shake violently as he recalls the moment he realised he was probably going to die.
“The lights were flickering as the engine spluttered and died and came on again,” he says.
“Part of your brain’s saying ‘it can’t be happening’ and the other part of your brain is sitting through it and you’ve nowhere to run.
“There’s nothing you can do. You are completely, completely helpless.”
Then a 33-year-old father-of-one, Chris had been looking forward to getting home to Belfast after a day at the London Boat Show, where he’d been scouting for equipment to sell in his chain of sports shops.
He was a seasoned flyer – travelling up to 35 times a year – and about 15 minutes after boarding the 19:50 British Midland flight from Heathrow, he was relaxing in row one with a meal and a glass of wine.
The next moment, his nerves were shattered by an explosion.
“We’ve heard bombs in Belfast for years,” says Chris. “It wasn’t a bomb.”
“It was just a huge, like an enormous backfire bang and the plane lurched.”
Sitting further back was 62-year-old Alan Johnston, one of the oldest travellers on the flight, who’d been in London visiting his first grandchild – a girl, born the day before the Lockerbie bombing.
For years, Alan had worked in the oil industry, often flying on ancient, unreliable planes. He’d had a couple of close shaves in the Middle East and Africa.
To him, this was a safe, short flight on a modern aircraft in a part of the world with an excellent safety record.
So while the loud bang terrified other passengers, Alan hardly batted an eyelid. His daughter had bought him a particularly gripping book and he intended to enjoy it.
Even when the plane began to shake, Alan read on.
Many around him, however, were beginning to panic – especially those who had noticed smoke drifting into the cabin.
Speaking over the tannoy, Captain Kevin Hunt tried to reassure them.
The right-side engine was malfunctioning, he announced calmly. He was preparing to shut it down and divert the plane to East Midlands Airport – base of the British Midland fleet.
It seemed that Alan’s resolve had been justified – the problem was in hand, and would be nothing more than an inconvenience.
As Captain Hunt reduced power the plane stabilised and peace gradually returned to the cabin. The smoke seemed to dissipate. Crew began to tidy away the half-eaten meals in preparation for landing at East Midlands – which was now only a few minutes away.
But at the back of the plane there was unease among a small group of passengers.
It wasn’t that they objected to the captain’s decision to turn off the engine. It was his choice of engine that was causing concern.
Looking out of the cabin windows, they’d seen sparks and flames, and were in little doubt the damage was serious. But this was on the left side of the plane, not the right.
Among the bewildered group was Mervyn Finlay, who was sitting by a window in row 21.
The bread delivery man from Dungannon had also been at the London Boat Show, and had managed to catch an earlier-than-planned flight back from Heathrow. He shouldn’t have been on that plane.
Now, instead of unwinding while he flew home to his wife and young son, he was grappling with the knowledge that the pilot might have made a serious error.
Had Captain Hunt switched off the wrong engine, leaving them at the mercy of a broken one?
“We were thinking: ‘Why is he doing that?’ because we saw flames coming out of the left engine. But I was only a bread man. What did I know?”
And then there was another loud bang.
Today, sitting in his comfortable living room, Chris Thompson closes his eyes as he recounts what happened next, one hand clutching the other to calm the shaking.
“You are immediately aware that you are thousands of feet in the air,” he says.
“At this time it’s dark outside. I can see the lines of lights down below from roads and this thing suddenly lurches and there’s a big bang. And then there’s another big bang.
“At that point it started lurching around all over the sky. That was horrendous and my skin just absolutely crawled because… we weren’t on the ground, we weren’t anywhere near the ground.
“I absolutely guarantee,” he adds with conviction. “If there had been a way off that plane, people would have killed each other to get off.”
As the plane lurched, passengers became gripped with panic, screaming, pleading with the engine to work and clutching one another for comfort.
By now, even Alan Johnston had to admit he was worried about the condition of the aircraft.
“Vibration is an understatement,” he says. “It was like a load of large-sized gravel being suddenly shovelled into a washing machine. It was that noise, plus violent vibration.
“[It was] something I had never experienced before and I tried to divert my mind as best I could.”
But there were still a few pockets of calm.
Dominica McGowan tried to convince the woman next to her they were “just going to come down with a bump”.
The then 37-year-old mother-of-three had been studying psychotherapy in London, and she drew on her training to reassure those around her.
Even today she remains cool, almost detached, as she recalls that night – though she admits she’s “blocked out” some of the horrors.
“It makes sense [not to think about what is happening]. Who would ever think they’d be in a plane crash? So I suppose there was an element of that.”
She calmly explained to her companion how they would simply “belly-flop” on to the runway.
But it wasn’t to be.
As panic escalated among other passengers, all that could be heard in the cabin was the whistle of the wind, mixed with screams and whimpers.
The wrecked engine gave a few dying sputters and jolts.
And then it gave out completely.
As the plane plummeted, survivors remember feeling their stomachs “leap” as if they were on a rollercoaster going over the top.
Chris Thompson looked out of the window and saw they were still nowhere near the ground. Far below him the lights of a motorway weaved dizzyingly.
It was then he realised – at this height and with no engines – there was little chance they would survive.
He began struggling to breathe as panic, compounded by g-force, gripped his body.
For all the passengers, those terrifying few seconds hurtling to the ground stretched out into minutes.
Then the captain called “brace, brace” for crash landing.
Moments before impact, Alan and Chris watched in confusion as a church spire sailed past the windows. It was then they realised how quickly they’d descended.
“Your brain says: ‘What? It can’t be. It can’t be.’ Then you think: ‘I’m about to die. No, I can’t be because I’m an optimist. It can’t be,'” says Chris.
“The next thing was an enormous crushing.”
- Forty-five minutes after taking off from Heathrow, British Midland Flight 92 crashed into the M1.
- Travelling at about 130mph, it hit a field on the southbound side of the motorway before plunging through trees and smashing into the embankment on the opposite carriageway.
- On impact, the front section of the plane – carrying about 15 people – broke away from the main body.
- The tail snapped off, flipped over, and landed upside-down on top of the right wing, alongside the mid-section of the fuselage.
- Inside, all but one overhead locker sprang open and luggage flew through the air, causing head injuries to almost every passenger, and killing some of them.
- Chairs shot forward, crushing people between the seats and causing horrendous leg wounds.
- The plane had come down yards from the village of Kegworth, just a few hundred feet short of the runway at East Midlands Airport.
- Moments earlier, two motorists had seen sparks flying from the jet as it descended towards them. Realising it was about to crash, they managed to slow traffic using their hazard-warning lights. It is still regarded as a miracle that no-one on the motorway was hurt.
The people of Kegworth are accustomed to the rumble of landing aircraft. But the thunderous rattle that shook their homes that quiet Sunday evening, as many of them settled down to watch television, was something else entirely.
A few people outside at the time, driving home or walking their dogs, had caught sight of the plane as it plunged towards the village.
Their eyes were first drawn to orange streaks in the winter sky. Then they saw the stricken jet – one engine spurting flames as chunks of burning metal fell away.
At the airport, emergency crews were patiently waiting for Flight 92 to land. They were often called when an aircraft had mechanical problems. Even with one engine, they always landed safely.
Among them was Dave Astle. The part-time firefighter from Melbourne in Derbyshire had been at his four-year-old daughter’s birthday party when the call came in.
For Dave, this was routine – nothing more than a precaution.
“It was coming in quite normal,” he says. “We were watching it coming in and then it just disappeared in a cloud of smoke.”
With horror, they realised the plane had actually crashed.
Using an airport access road, the fire engine got them as close to the scene as possible, before they scrabbled through trees and bushes to reach the edge of the motorway.
They found the remains of a Boeing 737, smoking and shattered into three pieces on the embankment.
As he recalls that night, Dave talks softly and drums his fingers on the table, often needing a prompt to describe what he saw.
Already, four people were out of the wreckage – he believes thrown from the plane – with one stuck in a tree, still in her seat.
“It was quiet. Very, very quiet. Horrible really. They [the four survivors] didn’t say anything. Whether they realised what had happened I don’t know,” Dave says.
Stepping into the eerie darkness of the upturned tail section, he could see passengers hanging upside down from their seats, many with twisted limbs, shattered ankles and lacerated faces.
Others were buried completely under the luggage strewn across the cabin.
But it was the smell that really stuck in his memory.
“I cannot describe it and I can’t relate it to anything,” he says.
“There was food on board and drink – you’ve got that smell as well. Spirits you could smell. This smell was something I’ve never experienced before or since. They said it was the smell of death.”
Another man who braved the carnage of the crash site was Graham Pearson – the only civilian rescuer to set foot inside the plane.
The Royal Marine and his wife Rosie were driving north up the M1 when the 737 roared overhead.
Only five minutes earlier, the pair had stopped for a break at a service station. Had they not, it would probably have been an uneventful journey home.
Graham clambered up the embankment to get to the wreckage, ignoring the risk of fire from the still-burning engine.
Inside he found Alice O’Hagan, who’d been travelling with her husband Eamon.
Like many of the passengers, they were trapped between broken seats that had been thrown forward on impact.
Alice tried to free herself, but couldn’t. Looking down, she realised why.
Speaking to BBC documentary Collision Course in 2003, she said: “I don’t know where I got the strength from but as I pushed the seat forward my feet came away. And as my feet came away I could see they were hanging off.”
Graham came to Alice’s aid, and began working to stem the blood pumping from her shattered legs.
Then he heard another woman cry out.
With tears in his eyes as he recalled the rescue, he told the programme: “At that moment in time it was quite quiet. People had just started to come out of unconsciousness or slowly started to realise what was going on.
“I heard this woman’s voice and she was calling for help to get a baby out.
“Being a father with children myself I could relate to that… it was like a magnet really, that’s what drew me to that part of the plane.”
After much effort, he managed to free seven-month-old Ryan McCallion who was shielded by his mother but trapped under several bodies.
The boy made a full recovery, but his mother Ruth was not so lucky. She died in hospital three weeks later, shortly before she was due to return home.
Graham was hailed a hero for the three-and-a-half hours he spent helping passengers. But the experience haunted him for years.
Flashbacks and recurring nightmares cost him his job and almost destroyed his marriage. In 1998 he successfully sued British Midland for £57,000.
Few, if any, escaped without some kind of physical or mental trauma. But Dominica McGowan was one of the most resilient.
Moments after regaining consciousness she managed to free herself from her seat and – like many others – was immediately struck by the absolute silence.
“I heard no sound,” she says. “Not a sound.”
“And I remember darkness. And I remember thinking: ‘I need to get out of here’.”
Although she didn’t know it, she had shattered her pelvis, broken all of her ribs, punctured a lung and broken her back.
