Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

This was the ill-fated British Midland plane

several hours before the disaster,

landing safely at Heathrow on its routine shuttle run from Belfast.

Yes. Nonsmoking window.

It was a Sunday night.

The flight that I was booked on was for 6.30.

I got to the gate probably 30 seconds after 6.30.

OK. Missed the flight. They wouldn't let me on.

The gate people said that

I could take the next British Midland flight.

So it was fine. Wasn't going to be delayed as much. OK.

Hello. Departures.

Gate six. Thank you. Bye.

Went back over to London about three or four times.

Sonia would have spent quite a bit in Oxford Street,

shopping or whatever. Have lunch, go to a show.

We went there to enjoy ourselves, and we certainly did.

Can I have the attention of all passengers travelling to Belfast?

Can they please come down to gate 49?

My father was in the RAF so I'd grown up with aircraft,

so I was perfectly happy getting on a plane.

Myself and my business partner,

we had a successful trip at the London Boat Show,

met a few new suppliers, and then we just had to fly home.

833, thank you. Cityhopper behind you.

When he's left, then push is approved.

That wasn't the plane that we were originally going to travel on.

We had been to meet friends in Wales...

..so we rescheduled our flight back home.

We could have easily have not have been on that plane...

..but we had changed it, and that was it.

Mm-hm. That was it, yeah. We were on it.

INDISTINCT PA ANNOUNCEMENT

The terrible tragedy of Lockerbie had just happened.

I think it was well known by January that it had been a terrorist attack.

NEWSREEL: Pan American Flight 103 had more than 250 people on board.

It came down on the village of Lockerbie in Dumfriesshire.

I was in Belfast. We were sitting at a bar,

and it had actually come up on the screen about Lockerbie.

I remember looking at it. It was unbelievable.

I remember saying to one of my friends,

"My goodness, look at that! We're flying out in January."

One never knew what was going to happen.

It never crossed my mind. It doesn't.

The anti-terrorist measures enforced at Heathrow Airport

are acknowledged to be among the tightest in the world.

Armed police regularly patrol the arrival and departure halls.

We were so used to having security.

Second nature, wouldn't it be?

With us seeing soldiers and police armed and things like that,

which you would never see in England,

because they don't have soldiers on the street.

But in Ulster, it was an everyday occurrence,

getting stopped and checked.

We walk down the jetway, we get onto the plane.

It actually smelt new. It was a brand-new aircraft.

I think it had only been flying for a few weeks,

so it just had a, you know, a nice, new smell.

I was sitting in the front row and, you know, everything seemed fine.

It was great.

I was flying home to see my wife and my daughter,

who was about ten months old at the time.

We were sitting two seats from the front.

I sat at the window so I could look out.

Eamon always let me have the window seat, keep me happy.

We were at the rear of the aircraft.

The cabin crew come around with the food.

I thought to myself, "This is great,"

because I said, "Right, I'll have my meal, have my glass of wine,

"and then whenever they come back,

"I'll maybe have a little whiskey just to finish it off."

I'm a big aviation enthusiast.

My father was a pilot with Aer Lingus.

In 1989, he would have been Aer Lingus' chief pilot.

He had flown all the models of 737 up to that point.

I would have known that it was the Boeing 737 400 series.

You saw that and you went, "Oh, it's one of the new ones!

"That's interesting. Let's see what that's like."

NEWSREEL: The Boeing 737 is the world's best-selling airliner.

It has a record of safety and reliability.

Suddenly, there was this just banging vibration.

There was an explosion.

That's all I can say.

There appeared to be an explosion.

To me, it sounded like somebody was outside

with a hammer trying to get inside.

It was just unbelievable noise.

There's a loud bang comes from the left-hand side, and I glance out,

and what I see is showers of sparks coming out

from the back end of the engine on that side.

The plane was shaking.

It was vibrating.

I looked out through the window...

..and I could see the engine, and it was like an oval flame.

It was the flames that was the terrifying bit.

Absolutely terrifying.

The shuddering...

..got worse.

Horrendous. Scary.

The cabin was filling with smoke.

You think, "My God, I'm up here. There's no getting off." Hmm.

Eamon took my hand and said,

"You know, we'll be fine, darling. Nothing will happen."

Which was a big lie!

I was petrified.

The flames were coming out of the engine,

and then it just suddenly stopped...

..as if somebody had flicked a switch,

and the plane seemed to stabilise.

Whatever they did in the cockpit, the shuddering stopped.

The pilot made an announcement,

and he said that there had been a fault with the right-hand engine,

that everything was under control,

and that we were going to divert to East Midlands,

and we'd all continue our journey from there.

I was concerned, but I wasn't overly concerned

because I knew an aircraft could fly on one engine.

I wouldn't say I was happy about it, but I knew we should be OK.

We thought, "Well, maybe that's the end of it."

We talked over, "We have to get home.

"I hope somebody put all the uniforms in the washing machine!" Yep.

"Have to get this ready for the children,"

and trying to make it as normal as possible,

and about what we WERE going to be doing.

Alls we were thinking about was get this plane down,

get it landed, get it on the ground.

You could feel the manoeuvres and you begin to hear

the control surfaces being deployed and that sort of thing.

The nose was tilted down a little.

The ground was getting closer.

There was another almighty explosion from the engine.

Only this time, it was worse because there was bits of the engine

hitting the fuselage close to where we were sitting.

The vibration was so strong I couldn't actually see

the person who was sitting beside me.

The noise stopped...

..and then there was just complete and utter silence.

The plane was coming down without any engines.

I knew something was catastrophically wrong.

All I could hear was what sounded to me like wind

whistling past the aircraft as the aircraft flew through the air.

I was looking out, and then I could see the lights.

And I knew then that we were definitely going to crash.

The next thing is the pilot

giving us the instructions for brace positions.

These were commands that you only seen in television.

No-one in their right mind ever thinks

it's going to happen to them. No-one.

We're going to crash.

The plane is going to crush.

We were at the station at Loughborough...

..and we got the call at 8.15, 8.20.

So we made our way to the airport,

and we'd just arrived as the plane was coming in.

We were approaching Kegworth on the M1

and there, very, very clear in the air just above the village,

was an airliner coming in.

And as we watched, the port engine exploded.

And then it started to turn,

and we watched it come round until in the end it disappeared

behind a forest of trees ahead of us.

An airliner with 118 passengers on board

has crashed on the M1 motorway in Leicestershire.

It came down near junction 24 of the motorway,

just short of the East Midlands Airport.

Immediately, the airport crew shot off in their appliances,

and we followed them.

NEWSREEL: The Boeing 737 almost made it to the East Midlands Airport

runway. Diverting from its Belfast course after a fire in one engine,

the pilot hoped to reach safety on the remaining one.

We didn't really know what it was.

It looked like a plume of smoke.

It could have been a load of dust.

I said, "Oh, it looks like smoke. "I'd better stop,"

which we did on the M1 bridge, and I got out of the car to look over.

It was only then that I actually looked to the side

and saw the plane on the side of the M1 on the embankment.

So that was really when the horror struck me

that what had happened, and people were inside the plane.

..at this stage, we're trying to get the aircraft over

so we can get a passenger list.

It looks like zero Bravo with an Echo on the end.

I can't give you any details...

Myself and Rob Dawson got to the bottom of the aircraft

and was looking up at the wreckage.

Its tail was hanging in the trees above that, split completely off,

and the whole back section of the aircraft

was swaying in the trees above the aeroplane.

I remember coming to in the wreckage,

and the first thing I thought was,

"There's going to be a fire. I've got to get out."

You could see all the people...

..bent over...

..obviously unconscious.

I remember touching the side of the cabin...

..wall, and it actually being hot.

And then I thought about fire.

The whole embankment was like a flood.

And I turned round to Rob and I said,

"Where the hell is all this water coming from?"

And he said, "It isn't water.

"Can't you smell it? It's aviation fuel."

I was just dangling in mid-air.

The next thing, when you got a few of your senses back again,

was the smell of aviation fuel.

I couldn't move.

Smelling fuel, knowing that the engine had been on fire...

..that was equally as scary as being up there at 4,000ft, 5,000ft.

Yeah.

NEWSREEL: The plane's wings, which were also fuel tanks,

remained intact, and firemen sprayed them with foam and drained hundreds

of gallons of fuel from them as the long night of rescue work began.

Locals, fearing another Lockerbie, rushed to the scene.

Their offers of help were readily accepted by the emergency services.

There were so many people running to the site to help.

The people didn't know whether there was anybody alive.

Were they badly injured or were they walking wounded?

Villagers are very sad and very sorry for the people that have died

and the people that are injured.

I noticed, where the wing was,

there was a doorway that had been opened.

I went towards that.

It was pitch-black inside.

And there was a passenger, and he stood up in front of me.

Made me jump, really.

And I said, "Are you all right?"

And he says, "Yeah."

And it was quiet.

There was no cries or anything.

I said, "Is it empty?"

He said, "No. They're all trapped."

And then you started to hear a few people shouting out,

but not massively. It was so strange.

My feet were trapped.

I remember pushing the seat in front, and my ankles...

..started sliding out, and I could see that they were pretty messed up.

And Eamon eventually made his way up beside me...

..and he tried to help me by ripping his shirt,

because he was going to tie my ankles off.

But he couldn't do it because his arm...

..was broken.

Rob got himself next to the shell of the aeroplane,

which had cracked just behind the wing.

I was on the other side of him,

hanging on to one tree with my left hand.

And that's how it was from about 8.20 till coming on midnight...

..that I was holding on to that tree with one hand

and lifting people down with my other hand, between us.

The ambulance men got up.

We started passing the people out of the aircraft as best we could.

Really surprising how many people came out alive

on that back section behind us there. Just unbelievable.

NEWSREEL: More than 30 ambulances queued up along the M1,

waiting to take the injured to nearby hospitals.

I got out of that aircraft...

..I don't know how.

I knew I'd broken my leg, because I could actually feel it.

I was definitely in pain by the side of the road.

There are blue lights and red lights and...

..into an ambulance. Off we go.

SIRENS WAIL

Ambulances started appearing at the A&E department

with people who had been taken off the plane badly injured.

NEWSREEL: Many of the victims

suffered broken bones and abdominal injuries.

By the time the fourth ambulance delivered its case,

we knew that this was a major incident.

NEWSREEL: RAF rescue helicopter pilots lowered their machines

carefully onto the road,

their rotor blades passing only feet from the motorway lights.

The fuselage had broken up, so the floor panels were crumpled.

So everybody that was still on that aeroplane,

they were all trapped.

I could feel something sticking out of my flesh,

and the arm was bent over at a right angle.

And I remember touching, just...

And I says, "I think my arm is broke."

NEWSREEL: Deep inside the shattered fuselage,

the firemen worked to cut their way through to those remaining.

One of the rescuers actually crawled into the aircraft,

and he was able to get my legs

and slowly pull me out.

Those people that were with us,

they were ours. They were our casualties.

And we were talking to them.

Anything to try and take your mind off it.

I mean, it's ridiculous, really, but that's what we tried.

They took me out of the ambulance, and I remember

I was wheeled in on a trolley on my back, facing the ceiling.

And these plastic doors open,

and suddenly I'm inside

with the doctors and nurses on either side.

I remember just that emotion of,

once the hospital doors opened,

just the relief was just... It was incredible.

I just thought, "Oh, you know, I've made it. I'm OK. I'm safe."

Well, I thought, just before we hit the deck,

you know, I thought, "This is it. We've had it."

I mean, the thought running through my mind that

there's not too many people survive an air crash.

So I guess I'm pretty lucky.

You know? It's...

It's a strange experience.

My ankle bones were severed...

..one of my heel bones was smashed,

and all my toes were broken.

The doctor said to me my feet were like a bag of crisps, broken crisps.

It was very painful.

NEWSREEL: Throughout the night at Belfast International Airport,

relatives and friends of passengers on the British Midland flight

from Heathrow to Belfast waited anxiously for news.

My father-in-law come up to the airport

along with my 18-month-old son for to pick us up from the flight.

NEWSREEL: Some complained that information was slow

in coming through.

Senior British Midland executives were sent to speak to them.

They took him down this corridor,

and that's whenever he was told that the plane had crashed...

..which must have been horrific.

They couldn't tell who had survived and who hadn't survived.

NEWSREEL: A fire chief said the last survivor was recovered

from the wreckage at 3.30 this morning.

The last body was removed an hour later.

Of 117 passengers

and one infant

on board the aircraft,

we believed that 44 are dead...

..and 73 and the infant have survived.

The eight crew members on board the aircraft have all survived.

We got on the minibus and nobody said anything at all.

It was just silence.

But the worst of it was when I finally got home...

..at my house...

..and I walked in,

and my wife and my two little girls

were sat watching television with the air crash

and myself on an interview, talking,

and they were watching it as I walked through the door.

And it's then that it hit me...

..and I had to go into the toilet and...

..sit down and have a... to be honest, I had a good cry.

Simple as that.

Because, you know, it really got to us then,

what we'd... what we'd done.

NEWSREEL: Tonight, the wreck lies silently beside the motorway.

The rescuers have gone. Their job is finished.

The crash investigators are just beginning theirs.

NEWSREEL: Daylight revealed a deep furrow in a field

above the motorway, the spot where the descending Boeing

first touched the ground with its tail,

bouncing into the motorway cutting beyond

and losing any chance of reaching the airport.

NEWSREEL: The pilot who survived will be a crucial eyewitness.

He's been praised for successfully negotiating his crippled aircraft

away from houses in the village of Kegworth.

There's always a pressure to try to come up with an answer

as an investigator.

The aircraft nearly made it to the runway,

but had clearly run out of energy.

Therefore, you're thinking in terms of,

maybe there is an engine problem of some sort.

Certainly, in comparison with Lockerbie,

the thing we could really rule out

was actually some sort of sabotage or improvised explosive.

NEWSREEL: Gathering evidence, the police carried out

an inch-by-inch search of the motorway this morning.

It's thought the aircraft initially came down in a field

and bounced on the M1's central reservation

before coming to rest on the muddy embankment.

The Kegworth accident happened

less than three weeks after the bombing at Lockerbie.

And the investigation teams were very hard stretched

to deal with two very significant accidents

at the same time.

The investigators, particularly with the new aircraft type,

all eyes were on them.

They would have felt a huge amount of pressure

to find the right answer,

but also that pressure to try and find a rapid answer.

We rule out nothing.

We simply cannot.

It's not for us at this stage to say,

but I've just spoken to three inspectors over there.

They obviously want to get at the engines,

and they will know a lot more when they've been able to do that.

REPORTER: Have you been told a possible cause, Mrs Thatcher?

NEWSREEL: The investigation is focusing on the 737's last minutes,

when the second engine failed.

At that point, what should have been a containable emergency

became a tragedy.

Initial speculation included the fact that

it was possible that both engines had failed on this aircraft.

It seems that British Midland Flight 092

was brought down by the failure of both engines on the Boeing 737.

British Midland have taken their other 737-400

out of service for the time being,

and Dan-Air and AirUK,

which each have one, have done likewise.

The probability of actually having two independent failures

on the same flight is statistically almost insignificant. It is tiny.

NEWSREEL: The odds of both failing may be millions to one against,

but it's still the starting point for the inquiry.

On the evening of our first full day...

..I was invited to go up in a police helicopter.

I suggested that what we would want to do is take photographs

from roughly where the aircraft should have been on the glide path.

NEWSREEL: If the Boeing's remaining engine had delivered its power

for just another 30 seconds, it would have reached the

runway threshold at the end of its string of approach lights,

half a mile beyond the motorway.

As the aircraft is coming to land,

it's still travelling at quite a high speed.

Most of the damage was done

when the aircraft hit the embankment at the far side of the M1.

And at that point,

people may have experienced G-forces of around 22 G.

Now, that's the equivalent of

22 times the normal force of gravity.

So if you imagine the weight of a body multiplied by 22 times,

then that is the weight that's being thrown against the seat in front...

..and that was one of the reasons that the injuries were so severe.

They tried their best.

We just had to keep going down to surgery every day

and they did a bit more work, and they did a bit more work.

So you were coming up and then you were coming out of the anaesthetic

and...the pain would just hit you.

I had a damaged retina on my eye...

..a fractured shoulder,

a compound fracture of the left arm,

ligament damage, and damage to both my knees.

NEWSREEL: Recovering in hospital in Nottingham,

some survivors were visited today by the Prince of Wales.

We had a visit by Prince Charles.

The Prince also talked to David and Sonia Seaton from Bangor,

travelling home from the London January sales.

He very kindly asked how I was,

and he says, "Sonia, after the crash,

"What was the first thing David said to you?"

For a while, the first few minutes,

David didn't speak, and I sort of thought...

But I sort of kept shaking him

and talking to him, and he kept conscious. But...

He finally said something?

Oh, yes, he did.

BOTH LAUGH

"Get off my leg!"

So, you know,

it was quite comical at the time. "Get off my leg!"

Brian, who was my best man at my wedding,

he got into his car and drove up from London,

and so he appeared at 2.00 in the morning,

stayed with me all night, which was good.

Felt good. Yeah.

Felt good.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was... It was important.

My parents actually flew over on the Monday.

The chaplain in the hospital had called them.

At that point, you began to learn the severity.

I hadn't seen a photograph at that point, so...

There were no newspaper photographs so you could see what was going on.

Nobody was really telling you about

the overall severity, so we didn't begin to learn that

really until the next day.

About, you know, the number of...

..unfortunate fatalities on the night, and in fact,

fatalities kept going for the first week, you know, people...

..erm...

WHISPERS: Sorry.

HE SIGHS HEAVILY

Do you want to take a break?

Maybe a minute. Yeah, yeah.

These things just sneak up on you and ambush you.

NEWSREEL: The grief caused by last Sunday's tragedy

in Leicestershire won't ever go away for the families of the victims.

In his homily, Father Anthony O'Connor said

they were united by a chain of sadness and heartbreak

with those families and communities throughout Northern Ireland,

Britain, and other countries and continents

who had also suffered in the crash.

NEWSREEL: Today's service was conducted

by the Reverend Trevor Williams.

He strongly criticised those

who'd tried to find a scapegoat for the disaster.

REV WILLIAMS: It's all too easy to lash out,

as some have done, to try and answer the question, "Why?"

by pointing the finger of blame,

to find, as it were, a target for our anger...

..even though the full facts of what happened

have yet to be revealed.

NEWSREEL: With some 400 planes still in service using similar engines

as the crashed British Midland Boeing,

accident investigators are working all out to pinpoint the cause

of Sunday night's crash.

In the days following an accident,

investigators have to remain incredibly open-minded,

because they will find information comes from many sources

and seems to be contradictory.

NEWSREEL: The last conversations that went on here

in the cockpit are now being analysed from recordings

in the Boeing's black box flight recorder,

which is already in Farnborough.

Investigators appear uncertain about what happened to the right engine,

which suffered a complete loss of power.

There is still confusion

over the sequence of events which finally led the plane to crash.

We were very interested,

particularly in what the state of the engines was.

It was very apparent that the right-hand engine looked undamaged,

but the left engine was much more damaged, and that got us puzzling.

At the point they were able to interview the flight crew,

they will have had one version of the story,

the point they looked at the digital flight data recorder,

and also listened to the cockpit voice recorder,

they could start to build a picture,

which in this case started to conflict with

some of the information that came from the passengers.

It was coming in that the witnesses,

particularly on the left-hand side of the aircraft, had seen sparks,

flames, coming from the left engine,

and this immediately started to ring some alarm bells.

There was an inconsistency here which needed to be answered.

And joining me now from the scene of the crash is Ed Trimble,

a member of the team investigating the cause of the accident.

Well, Mr Trimble, there has been some confusion.

Can we try and clear it up once and for all?

First of all, when we talk about the engine on the left side,

what happened to it?

So we can see signs of fire damage on the left engine.

Now, what about the other engine? The engine on the right-hand side.

What do you know about that?

It...looks as though it's in a zero thrust condition,

consistent with shutdown before the aircraft crashed.

That must have been there

for the engine that failed just before the plane

was due to land on the runway.

No.

So when was THAT shut down?

It was shut down at a previous point in the flight.

What are the possibilities? Why would that engine stop?

We have no evidence at the moment

of a mechanical failure on the right engine.

So are you suggesting that it could be a human error?

At this stage of the investigation,

all possibilities are open in that regard.

And we really will be, erm,

little forward until we do a strip examination of both engines.

Are there any signs of fire on the right-hand engine?

No. It was... But you're convinced that it wasn't operating,

erm, towards the end of the flight?

That engine was shut down before the aircraft crashed.

The investigator in charge, Eddie Trimble,

realised quite early on that, in fact,

the right-hand engine had been shut down prior to the aircraft landing.

And when he shared that on the One O'Clock News,

that changed the story for so many people,

and there was a very strong reaction against that.

NEWSREEL: The pilot, whose back and legs were broken in the crash,

gave evidence to investigators today,

as some newspapers suggested it could have been his fault.

Captain Kevin Hunt spent half an hour this morning

with aviation accident investigators.

He hasn't seen some of today's newspaper speculation

about the cause of Sunday night's crash,

and he hasn't been listening to radio

or watching television news bulletins.

If it emerges that the starboard engine was completely safe,

how could an experienced pilot have shut down the wrong engine?

The speculation, they were trying to find blame.

Was it the engines? Can we blame the engines?

Was the pilot? Can we blame the pilot?

Was it...anything else?

I mean, here's this man, 25 years flying,

wakes up one morning, takes his plane,

has this terrible accident that occurs,

does his best, and then is found to be a hero in the morning

and now a villain at night. And I think that's rather tragic,

the way we deal with these personalities

before we've had a proper examination of the facts.

NEWSREEL: A heavy crane was manoeuvred into position

to lift the tail section.

The chief crash investigator Ed Trimble has been told

to give no further TV interviews after he told the BBC

that he could find no evidence of a fire in the right-hand engine.

REPORTER: Mr Trimble, BBC. Can we talk to you?

I'm sorry.

I couldn't conceive that something so disastrous had actually occurred.

How could they possibly have turned off the wrong engine?

NEWSREEL: Checks are being made on cockpit instruments,

which could possibly have given the pilot inaccurate information

about the emergency he was fighting to control.

Some of what enters your head, then,

is, well, I could see it was the left-hand engine. So...

..what could we have done? Should we have done? You know what I mean?

The whether or not you should have put your hand up...

..kind of hangs heavy.

NEWSREEL: Investigators believe the tip of a turbofan blade

sheared off and crashed through the casing of an engine.

The initiating event in the whole thing

was the failure of one blade of the left-hand engine.

The engine and other parts were taken to the manufacturers.

They discovered the number 17 fan blade at the front had broken

and part of it had fallen back into the engine,

causing extensive damage.

There was a lot of vibration,

a lot of noise, and the engine actually went into what we call

surge, which includes bangs and high vibration.

It's almost like an engine backfiring.

NEWSREEL: One second after the vibration started,

the First Officer, David McClelland, said, "We got a fire."

Eight seconds later, he said...

Captain Kevin Hunt replied...

Mr McClelland...

"OK," said Captain Hunt.

"Throttle it back."

Having diagnosed what they thought was the failing engine,

they pulled the throttle back on that engine.

And actually, as they did that,

the vibration and the smoke seemed to go away.

And the crew identify that as being,

"Oh, that confirms we did the right thing,"

and they then proceed to shut down the right-hand engine.

They didn't actually have a fire warning,

so it would not be necessary

for them to have shut down the right-hand engine.

They believed they had a healthy engine, which would be enough

to fly that aircraft to an alternative destination.

As they prepared to make their landing,

what is normally the case, they will apply additional thrust.

And it was in doing that that the damaged engine actually

started to fail further.

The crew at that point have no options.

They can't restart the right-hand engine in time,

and that makes the descent into the motorway

sort of inevitable.

CRUMPLING, GLASS SHATTERS

NEWSREEL: The official report into the M1 air crash criticises the

two pilots, Captain Kevin Hunt and the co-pilot David McClelland.

It says they acted prematurely when they shut down what turned out to be

the plane's good engine.

The report said their hasty decision to turn off

the wrong engine caused the tragedy.

The crew felt that they followed their training,

that they responded to the information that was available

to them at the time.

NEWSREEL: The pilots of the British Midland Jet

are to leave the airline in January.

British Midland said it viewed with "grave concern"

the report's conclusion that the pilots' actions

were contrary to their training.

Subsequent to the accident,

when people made reports about human error and pilot error in this case,

they felt that was an unfair characterisation

of what they'd done,

and so they defended their position very strongly.

The basic understanding of pilot error is...

..they, the pilots, messed it up.

They made a mistake. They completely went...off the rails.

We certainly made a mistake.

We both made mistakes.

Certainly not deliberately. And...the question

that WE would like answered is WHY did we make those mistakes?

ARCHIVE: David McClelland had been hoping to resume his flying career

with British Midland.

He also attacked the media's selective coverage

of the investigator's report.

It contains a great number of criticisms.

Some are directed at us, some are directed elsewhere.

I cannot begin to tell you of the frustration

I feel that these other criticisms have been given less press coverage

than have those directed against Kevin and myself.

The accident investigation report,

whilst it mentioned the actions of the pilots,

actually focused more on the technical failure

that led to the engine failing in the first place,

but also in terms of flight deck design,

the ergonomics and the training

that led the crew to make the decision that they did.

NEWSREEL: Among its recommendations, the report says that

television cameras should be installed in the tails of aircraft

to give an accurate view of external problems.

The stories of Kegworth very much tend to focus on the error

that was made by the crew, but actually, there were many lessons

to be learned from that accident,

and there's been many changes across the industry as a consequence of it.

NEWSREEL: Mrs O'Hagan's ankles were almost severed in the impact.

She still has to use a wheelchair to go shopping,

and she's had to give up her perfume franchise.

My right leg,

we couldn't get it into a position that it was...

..easier to walk on...

..and the pain levels were very high,

so they decided I'd be better off having an amputee.

What we realised from our research at Kegworth

was that a lot of the occupants had broken their legs,

couldn't walk, and therefore if there had been a fire,

couldn't have got out the plane.

NEWSREEL: A research team quickly embarked on the most detailed study

yet of air crash survivors.

Every survivor was photographed and interviewed.

Every injury, including minor cuts and bruises, was logged.

Because of the close proximity of the Kegworth accident to Nottingham,

where Professor Angus Wallace did his work,

it meant that we learnt a huge amount about

what happens in severe accidents like aircraft accidents.

The height and weight of one passenger from the centre

of the plane, and the position he was sitting in,

were added to recreate his exact movements

during the split-second crash.

That information has had a profound effect around the world

in terms of aircraft design,

but also in terms of the procedures we use

to teach people about things like the brace position.

The further they investigated the Kegworth crash,

the more critical they became over cabin safety.

NEWSREEL: Under impact conditions, the design of the seats

and the restraint systems can have a significant effect on survival.

The objective we set was to try

and make future air crashes safer.

For the brace for impact position,

we recommend that the feet are placed

on the ground slightly behind the knees.

At 20G, roughly the force of the Kegworth crash,

the legs on the rear dummy move forward on impact,

but only slightly,

and the flailing of the arms, which caused so many fractures

in Kegworth, is much less.

We all, the whole research team,

felt we were doing something special.

We can't bring people back,

but we can do something to make life better in the future.

The people in Kegworth and round that area

were just magnificent to us, absolutely.

They brought us presents. They took...

I mean, they didn't have to do that, but they did.

They did. And we're grateful.

We've great respect for the people who helped us,

and the rescue service as well.

You think that's what you're there for because that's your job.

That's your job, to get them people out.

How it all came together,

the people that were in their cars that night,

and people from Kegworth town came.

They, they... Because it was so close.

They saw this plane coming down and they came in their cars...

..and they were helping.

So it's fantastic, you know.

You can't believe

how people come together.

Come on.

It was not possible to put a memorial by the M1.

It was too dangerous.

So the soil was brought from the air crash site,

tonnes of it, to here,

so that it could form part of the memorial garden.

As the parish clerk, I had to organise the actual printing

of the names on the memorial.

That was one of the hardest things that I had to do,

because obviously I had to type out the names.

And of course, every single one

of those people had passed away.

And I found it extremely difficult. I kept trying to type them,

and I had to stop because it upset me so much,

thinking that those...

..each of those names was one person that had died in the disaster.

There's never, ever one reason for an accident to occur.

I don't put the blame onto anyone or any company or anything.

It was something that was a multitude of things and it happened.

And I'm only too thankful that Sonya and myself are alive,

that I can tell my story.

If it can help anybody else for the ones who

their members of their family died on the aircraft,

if this...is just a way of letting them know they're not forgotten.