Kegworth: Flight to Disaster
The air disaster that changed flight safety. Survivors and eyewitnesses tell their story of the terrifying moment Flight BD092 crashed into the side of the M1 motorway.
It should have been a routine flight from London to Belfast. But on a January night in 1989, British Midland Airways Flight BD092 became the centre of one of Britain’s worst air disasters. Mid-flight, the plane started violently shuddering. With smoke and smells of burning, pilots shut an engine down and diverted for an emergency landing in the East Midlands. Yards from the safety of the runway, the plane plunged into an embankment at the side of the motorway. Despite catastrophic damage and wreckage drenched in aviation fuel, remarkably rescuers found survivors.
Through deeply personal interviews, passengers recount the terror of those final moments and the unimaginable aftermath. Coming just weeks after a bomb destroyed the Pan Am 103 jet over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, air crash investigators scrambled to find a cause for the disaster. Rare archive footage and expert analysis uncovers the chain of decisions that sealed the fate of 47 passengers and injured dozens more.
How did a routine flight turn into a catastrophe? And what lessons were carved from the wreckage to make flying safer today? From the terror in the cabin to the heroism on the ground, this is the story of the Kegworth air disaster, the crash that changed aviation forever.
On TV
Clip
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Alice and Barrie
Duration: 00:41
Credits
| Role | Contributor |
|---|---|
| Producer | John Martin |
| Director | John Martin |
| Executive Producer | Nicola Alexander |
| Executive Producer | Simon Miller |


