The New Statesman.

25 years ago, in the early hours of December 29, 2000, a British Airways jumbo jet flying from London to Nairobi suddenly dropped nose first through the sky.

Inside the cockpit, a passenger had seized the controls. In the cabin, nearly 400 people woke to the sound of metal straining, trolleys flying, and the realization that this might be the last thing they ever experienced. The plane did not crash. Today's story is about what happens when disaster is narrowly avoided, and how that can be harder to process and easier to forget

than catastrophe itself. It's also a story of competing memories, institutional silence and

the unsettling question of whether a tragedy that never happened can still change the course of

history. I'm Olly Doug Moore and I'm joined now by Kate Mossman, the author of a remarkable

new statesman feature on British Airways Flight 2069. Hello, Kate. How are you?

Very well, thank you. How are you? Yeah, very well.

Kate, before we get into the story, I think it's worth foregrounding. This hijacking, I mentioned the day at the top. It happens a few months before 9-11, right? Yeah. And a man gets into the cockpit, comes close to crashing the plane. It does pose this counterfactual, doesn't it? It does make you think about alternate universes. And obviously, everything's hypothetical, everything's speculative, but nevertheless, it feels like a very strange and sort of sliding doors moment in world history, doesn't it? Yes, it's the issue of cockpit security and the difference between pilots and maybe

passengers thinking a cockpit ought to be locked and authorities saying there needed to be a

constant flow of communication between the flight crew and the cabin crew, um, the cockpits ought to be

maybe locked on takeoff, but then there should be sort of passage in and out during flight,

which of course to us is hard to imagine now. Um, and everything changed, of course, on September

the 11th and seven days after September the 11th, the locking of cockpits became

international law. They were reinforced. You know, you had to, they were sort of bulletproof.

They had keypad entry systems. But just nine or ten months before that, when this occurred,

you could just walk in. And I still find that amazing. You know, when I get onto a

plane now, I had this weird superstition about not wanting to look into the cockpit because I

almost, I want to trust the pilot, but I don't want to see who's doing that. The responsibility

is so great. I just want to believe that it's going to be okay. I don't want to see it. Yeah,

it's a higher power maybe, perhaps guiding the plane. Yeah, I was flying. I just want to believe that it's going to be okay. I don't want to see it. Yeah, it's a higher power maybe, but I was, I was flying recently and I've got a young daughter. I was rocking her. She was crying. She's a baby. And we were in the kind of galley bit, you know, where they like, make coffees and things like that. And one of the pilots needed to go for a pee and open the door. And like, he was shot. He was like, he almost took an intake of breath because there I was. And it was almost like my infant daughter had scared him. Because it's such a different world now where the, you know, the idea that the door has been open, there's someone there and like, you know, what could, what could have happened? It's absolutely incredible.

Complete change. And they were encouraged to go out and, and as the captain of this particular plane says, talk up the airline first class. You know, you had to do a bit of schmoozing and a bit of a bit of PR. And of course there were decades in which, you know, little Jimmy was allowed to come and ride with the pilot or a celebrity.

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