‘I saw the sparks as we went down the runway. Then I saw the explosion. We all feared for our lives’ — The Athletic 30/3/21

By Phil Hay

There was no hanging around at Upton Park. Into the dressing room, clothes changed and everyone on the bus up to Stansted. A plane was waiting for Leeds United, scheduled to take off at 10:30pm.

The game itself encouraged a sharp exit. Leeds had lost 3-0 to West Ham United and, in footballing terms, barely turned up. Match reports filed for the following morning recorded a mistake for the first goal, a mistake for the second and a mistake for the third; blunders all around. Bryn Law was there as a commentator for BBC Radio Leeds, a two-man team with Norman Hunter as his pundit. They filed it away as a result to forget.

“The only good thing about what happened next was that it stopped people talking about the result,” Law jokes. “The performance was awful and we were ready for a quiet journey home. I expected it to be pretty flat.”

Leeds were not in the habit of flying to domestic matches but when Sky Sports moved West Ham away to a Monday night, the club decided that a there-and-back plane trip made more sense than busing up and down to London. The directors could go with the players and there was room aboard for a few corporate supporters too. All being well, they would arrive home at Leeds Bradford Airport before midnight. Law was offered a spare seat, the only journalist in the travelling group.

“It was very rare for us to do that,” says Peter Ridsdale, the club’s then-chairman. “But when Sky rearranged the game, it seemed like the obvious thing to do, to go and come back on the same day and avoid spending hours on a coach.” Leeds hired a twin-propellered Hawker Siddeley 748 and got ready to go. The aircraft was 20 years old but its certificate of airworthiness was valid for another 12 months and it had no history of problems. Ridsdale was happy with the arrangements. His son Matthew tagged along.

The final hours of March 30, 1998, should have been reflective and subdued. Some players were lost in their own thoughts after the abject defeat. Four of them in the seats behind Law and Hunter were setting up a card school. A few seconds after take-off, the plane’s captain, John Hackett, heard “the most almighty bang” behind him and felt the aircraft veer violently to the right. “The night sky lit up all around us,” Hackett says. “The first thought that came into my head was, ‘A bomb’s gone off’.”

On the morning of the game at West Ham, Leeds’ players and staff drove to Leeds Bradford Airport and boarded their flight. Ian Harte, the club’s left-back, remembers that take-off as vividly as the drama of the return flight, sensing that the plane was struggling to get airborne.

“As we left, I was sat there thinking, ‘Come on. Get up, get up, get up’,” Harte says. “I don’t know if the wind or something else was making it difficult but it didn’t feel right. It seemed to take forever for us to be in the air. But then you’re away and you’re all having a bit of a nervous laugh about it, like, ‘It could have been the end for us, boys!’ After that, you’re just thinking about the game. If it wasn’t for what happened coming home, I wouldn’t have given it another thought.”

Hackett was a vastly experienced pilot with 30 years of flying behind him. He had never been involved in an air emergency and would not be involved in another before his retirement. He is 85 now and lives in Cheshire, a volunteer at an aviation museum in Greater Manchester. “I’ve had sleepless nights about it,” he says. “They weren’t constant but I think about it more than you would imagine. It’s always at the back of your mind. But at the time it was just another flight. There was nothing unusual about it.”

When Leeds landed at Stansted, various people went their separate ways. The players set off to prepare for the match. The directors had other duties to fulfil. Law and Hunter hung out with fans who had travelled to the capital, going 10-pin bowling and killing time before the evening kick-off. “Leeds were so bad at West Ham, you almost had to see it to believe it,” Law says. “To put it bluntly, it was one of those games where they might as well not have bothered.”

The plane home to Yorkshire was due to taxi at 10:30pm but an issue with baggage meant it was delayed and sat on the tarmac for almost an hour. Stansted had long runways, more than 12,000 feet long, and although the plane needed only 4,500 feet to take off, Hackett chose to use the whole of the runway allocated to him. It was one of the decisions that would save the lives of all 44 people on board.

“There’s an old adage with us pilots about the four things that aren’t used enough in life,” Hackett says. “The runway behind you, the sky above you and the capacity of your fuel tanks.” And the fourth? “The Pope’s balls,” he laughs.

“If you leave a lot of runway behind you, it’s runway that can’t help you if you suddenly need it. Because we had runway left when the plane came down, it meant I was able to try and land it. Otherwise, we’d have been hitting the grass. I don’t think of this story as me doing anything other than the job I was trained to do but that was one of the things that meant we were all able to walk away from the plane.”

Hackett’s first officer, Gary Lucas, had responsibility for flying the plane back to Leeds. It was standard procedure for the pilots to take turns. An air accident investigation report published in December 2001 detailed how passengers saw sparks coming from the engine on the plane’s right wing as it accelerated down the runway but in the cockpit, they had no warning of what was coming. Black box recordings indicated that, three or four seconds after take-off, the engine exploded. Commotion was heard in the background. A fractured turbine disk, weakened through wear-and-tear, tore through it and set it alight.

“I was on that side of the plane and I could feel it getting warmer and warmer,” says Robert Molenaar, the former Leeds defender. “It was dark outside so I wasn’t sure if we were even in the air but I saw the engine catch fire and I knew straight away that something was very wrong.” Law’s first recollection is of Molenaar shouting, “It’s getting fucking hot in here”, and of panic brewing. Ridsdale was so close to the blaze that the window next to him melted in a matter of seconds, sticking to his club blazer.

“I saw the sparks as we went down the runway,” Ridsdale says. “It didn’t look right at all. Then I saw the explosion. Some of us started shouting to the pilot, ‘Put it down, put it down’, which was a bit of a joke because he was the one who knew what to do. But it was the instinctive reaction of people who were terrified. I think we all feared for our lives.”

When the engine blew up, Hackett, as the senior pilot on board, immediately took over control of the plane from Lucas. They were less than 100 feet off the ground at that point. Protocol advised a captain in that situation to continue into the air and starve the fire of oxygen but Hackett was aware of incidents in which planes with similar malfunctions had crashed with catastrophic consequences after attempting to continue their ascent. “We’d fired the fire extinguishers to no effect,” Hackett says. “They did absolutely nothing. I was in a situation where I had literally seconds to decide what to do.

“From what I knew, there was a serious chance that if I didn’t try and land, the engine would drop off and the wing would disintegrate. None of us would have survived that. These days, if you’re on a plane that has a failure in one engine you wouldn’t even notice. They’re contained by stainless steel. But this was 20-odd years ago, and the plane itself was 20 years old. Because the explosion was an uncontained failure, it did a lot of damage. I couldn’t be sure how bad it was, so I couldn’t risk taking us up. I decided to land. It was purely a gut reaction.”

In all, there were 27 seconds between the plane leaving the runaway and Hackett touching it down for the first time. It bounced wildly along the runway and continued onto the grass beyond. “Norman and I were sat at the very front and we’d just had the standard safety briefing,” Law says. “Then we’re there with our heads between our knees, doing it for real. It was scary and the fact that I remember it so vividly tells you it left an indelible mark on me.

“It was apparent to us that the engine was fully aflame and if we’d gone up into the air, it would most likely have been catastrophic. Those 27 seconds were incredibly long, an awful lot of time to contemplate everything. ‘The likelihood is I’m going to die’. That’s how I felt. Then we bumped down. Then we bumped down again. The front of the plane tipped forward and the whole thing came to a halt. I had no idea where we were.”

The plane ploughed to a halt 118 metres beyond the end of runaway 23, more than 500 metres from its starting point. The front landing wheels were torn off when it hit one of the airport’s supply roads, causing it to come to rest on its nose. The M11 motorway was visible and had been narrowly avoided. “That’s where the heroism of it comes in,” Law says. “The pilot had no time to make that call. It was split-second and it was lifesaving.” Ridsdale agrees: “I can’t give the pilot any higher praise than to say he saved all of our lives. I’ve never had any doubt that without that decision, we’d all be dead.”

Molenaar is almost embarrassed to admit that he was unruffled in the moment. “I was far too cool,” he says. “I can’t explain it because it’s not natural. I kept saying to everyone, ‘Keep calm, don’t panic’, and as soon as we got out of our seats, the first thing I did was try to get my washbag out of the overhead locker.” Harte recalls seeing Molenaar dithering halfway down the aisle. “There was plenty of panic,” Harte says, “but for some reason, Rob seemed to be taking his time. I remember someone shouting to him, ‘The wing’s burning. Come on, get off the fucking plane!’”

Ridsdale’s star-struck son had chosen to sit with the players rather than his father and was towards the back of the cabin. “You had the panic of the crash and the worry about whether anyone was injured or worse,” Ridsdale senior says. “But for me, there was also the realisation that my son wasn’t with me. I was up the front so I tried to get to the back of the plane to find him. It turned out that he’d got out without waiting for me.” There were other little comical moments in the confusion, like one of Hackett’s stewardesses telling him it was “the smoothest landing you’ve ever made”.

Leeds’ manager, George Graham, had remained in London after the game so was not on the flight. His assistant, David O’Leary, forced open an emergency door on the side of the plane away from the fire and, despite problems with the rear emergency slides (something highlighted in the accident report’s recommendations), the evacuation was completed in less than a minute. Hackett was the last to leave after a final check of the seats.

When a door at the front opened, Law and Hunter “legged it” and made their escape. “Norman had a bit of an issue with his knees, going back to his playing days,” Law says. “I’d never seen him move so fast.”

Out on the runway, and a safe distance from the fire, a headcount was carried out. Law stood and watched silhouettes created by the fire of people hanging off the back of the plane and dropping down to safety. One fan got cold feet about jumping and was given a push by one of the players. Remarkably, there were no fatalities or even any serious injuries. “I was stood with (goalkeeper) Nigel Martyn,” Molenaar says. “All he said was, ‘Honestly, we’ve struck it very lucky here’.” Some of the passengers were silent. Others were hysterical.

“I spoke to (striker) Rod Wallace, who never really said anything to anyone,” Law says. “He was a guy you never interviewed. But he was different in that moment, totally hyper and full of adrenaline. You couldn’t really process anything.”

A coach arrived and drove everyone to safety in a nearby terminal. Three of the players in the card school still had their hands of cards with them. Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink’s portable desk was found on the grass by the plane. Players began phoning home to tell their families what had happened, before news of the crash became public.

“I wanted to make sure my wife knew I was OK,” Molenaar says. “I had to tell her before she heard about it somewhere else because otherwise, she’d be up all night, wondering if we were OK.” Investigators completed a few formalities and then told the squad they were free to leave. “Someone asked us if we wanted another flight,” Harte says. “Bloody hell, you’re having a laugh! No chance were any of us flying. We got a bus.”

Law’s journalistic instinct kicked in as he returned to the terminal. He borrowed a mobile phone from defender David Wetherall and rang BBC Five Live. It was past midnight and when he told the switchboard he had been involved in a plane crash, they hung up on him. He phoned back to insist he was being serious. He was put through to the Up All Night show and broke the story of the accident.

“There was no other reporter on the plane, so no one else knew about it,” Law says. “It was like an exclusive you were actually part of, which was a very strange experience.”

In the days that followed, the Daily Express asked him to write a first-person account of the accident and by the time he rolled into Leeds in the early hours of the morning, a crowd of journalists were waiting at Elland Road.

The players had been diverted to Leeds Bradford Airport, where their cars were parked. One of their wives had received a phone call and tried to tell the airport’s staff that the plane had crashed. “They didn’t believe her,” Law says. “I don’t think they could comprehend the fact that it had gone down and none of them realised.”

As the dust settled and the investigation picked up pace, Hackett was the target of criticism by people he calls “armchair pilots”.

Some said he should have followed protocol by taking the plane higher into the air (the investigation report stated plainly that Hackett was entitled to “use his discretion” in deciding what to do. It also found that there was nothing warning him to abort the take-off). Some questioned if he had done the right thing. It was standard procedure to ground a pilot while an air accident inquiry took place but Hackett was told he would not be suspended. When he went back to the crash site to begin working with the investigators the next day, every one of them congratulated him and shook his hand.

Hackett was back in the air later that week, in command of a short-haul flight to Belfast. “It’s like what they say about falling off a horse,” he says. “You get back on and keep going. You don’t stop.

“I didn’t feel any tension flying again. The standard thing after an incident like ours was to send you to see a psychiatrist. The one I spoke to started trying to talk to me about my childhood and things like that. I had to say, ‘This is nothing to do with my childhood. It’s just a matter of me being involved in an accident’.

“I knew I’d complied with the regulations and I knew it was a bit of a one-off. These things happen so rarely. I was just an unlucky sod.”

There were after-effects of the crash at Stansted. Harte found flying difficult for many years afterwards. “I’d be sitting there sweating as I went on holiday with my wife,” he says. “It took quite a long time to get used to.” Law also found night flights difficult initially. Molenaar took a trip on a similar aircraft to his home in the Netherlands, simply to prove to himself that the average journey was entirely safe.

“It was something I needed to do,” Molenaar says. “The emotion of it and everything else, you didn’t want it to affect the rest of your life. But when I think about it, I know we were lucky. I was calm at the time, too calm really, but in those seconds it didn’t stop me thinking it could be the end for us. And if you ask me, I can’t tell you a single thing about the game at West Ham. Because I’ve never thought about it.”

In the hours after the accident, Hackett and his crew were put on another plane and ferried back from Stansted. When they landed and walked down the steps, the husband of the flight’s first stewardess walked up to Hackett and hugged him. “He thanked me for saving his wife,” Hackett says. “Then he thanked me for saving their unborn baby.

“We’ve stayed in touch ever since then and I’ve seen that little bump grow up to graduate from university and become a school teacher. I had no idea Helen was even pregnant. Which, like a lot of things, make you think.”