Captain Details 'Worst Nonfatal Event in Aviation History'

British Airways Flight 2069 was somewhere over the Sahara in the early hours of Dec. 29, 2000, when its captain woke in his bunk to find the jumbo jet seemingly flying like a stunt plane. As detailed by Kate Mossman for the New Statesman, pilot Bill Hagan, roused from a rest break, stepped into the cockpit in his underwear to discover co-pilot Phil Watson wrestling for control of the Boeing 747 with a passenger: 27-year-old Kenyan student Paul Mukonyi. The aircraft, carrying about 400 people from Gatwick Airport in London to Nairobi, Kenya, had pitched into a steep dive, losing roughly 10,000 feet as terrified passengers braced for impact. Among them: musician Bryan Ferry and members of Jemima Khan's family, who later described assuming they were about to die.

Hagan says he plunged his finger into Mukonyi's eye "to damage his brain," while Watson fought to recover the aircraft from an aerodynamic stall, a technique rarely practiced in airline simulators. Several passengers, including two Americans on a church mission trip, helped drag Mukonyi from the controls and restrain him. The plane stabilized and continued to Nairobi, where Mukonyi was placed under psychiatric care and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He was released weeks later without criminal charges and returned to France.

For Hagan, now 78, the near-disaster has become a 25-year obsession. He has assembled a dense paper trail suggesting authorities downplayed the severity by classifying it as an "air rage" incident rather than a serious loss of control, meaning no full report from the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch exists. Hagan argues Flight 2069 was "the worst nonfatal event in aviation history" and believes that treating it as a formal security wakeup call—especially around cockpit doors—might have pushed the industry to act months before 9/11. Watson is less consumed by the aftermath, viewing it as a contained "event," yet he, too, pressed British Airways for tougher cockpit security and says it was "in BA's corporate interest to downplay it." More here.