The Day A Plane's Window Blew Out During Flight And Sucks Pilot Out . This is the horrifying story of an aviation disaster that was narrowly averted in June 1990, when a wrongly-installed panel of the windscreen on British Airways Flight 5390 fell out, causing the plane’s cockpit to decompress and its captain to be pulled halfway out of the aircraft at over 17,000 feet. BA 5390 left Birmingham Airport at 7.20am, heading for Malaga in Spain. At the controls were Captain Tim Lancaster, 42, and his co-pilot, 39-year-old Alastair Atchison, both experienced flyers, and their take-off was routine. Less than 15 minutes into the flight, with the plane at 17,300 feet over Oxfordshire, there was a loud bang in the cockpit, and the windscreen on the captain’s side blew out from its mooring, causing immediate decompression. Both pilots had loosened their harnesses, and Lancaster was forcefully pulled toward the open window by the rush of air. The whole top half of his body was dragg...