Career dream crashes down

BA038 passed just 6m above the busy A30 before slamming into the grass. Photo / Supplied

For Peter and Maria Burkill, this was the dream. As they sit on the balcony of their £500,000 ($1.07m) home, their three young sons play in a garden leading to the edge of the River Severn.

In 1987, Peter landed a job with British Airways when it really was the world's favourite airline. Skilled, dashing and eventually earning £130,000 a year, he had it all. And then the dream came crashing to earth.

"Speedbird 38, cleared to land." Burkill prepares to bring down BA038 from Beijing to London Heathrow.

It is January 17, 2008, and, though Burkill, captain on the flight, doesn't know it, there are just 35 seconds from impact.

In Worcester, Maria is caring for 10-week-old Coby, Troy, 3, and 1-year-old Logan. Their father has been away for days.

"We were all looking forward to getting home," he recalls.

Everything seems normal on the flight deck of the Boeing 777, where the first officer, John Coward, has taken the controls so Burkill can direct the landing.

"Stable," the captain says.

"Well, sort of," Coward replies.

The first officer is pushing the throttles, but nothing happens. There has been a double engine failure. Following protocol, Burkill leaves Coward at the controls while he tries to rescue the situation.

With 21 seconds to impact, the loss in power is causing an alarming drop in speed.

"We were about to stall and fall out of the sky," Burkill says. The only way to go faster is to take a steeper approach.

It works, but results in a terrifying change of view through the windscreen.

"We were heading straight for the buildings around Hatton Cross Tube station," Burkill recalls. "For an aircraft travelling at about 200km/h, that's carnage. There were 152 people on board and we were all going to die."

Burkill must reduce the drag to create enough lift to clear Hatton Cross. "If I could make the perimeter road at least some of us might survive," he says.

He turns to the flaps, which are fully extended. Bringing them in will reduce drag, but could increase the risk of stalling. He takes the gamble.

Seconds later, the aircraft's 14 giant wheels pass just 6m above the busy A30 before slamming into the grass, 330m short of the runway.

Screams echo in the cabin and the plane starts to break up as it hurtles across the airfield. "I started saying goodbye to Maria and the boys in my head," Burkill says.

Finally, the flight comes to a stop. To Burkill's surprise, none of the crew is injured but, still believing many of his passengers to be dead and with the risk of fire high, he makes the call every pilot dreads:

"This is the captain. This is an emergency: Evacuate, evacuate."

The next day, Burkill saw his photograph splashed across front pages.

Thanks to his actions, there had been only minor injuries among passengers and crew. After a hero's welcome, he revealed at a press conference that Coward had been at the controls.

Company policy prevented him saying anything else, leaving some reporters wondering what Burkill's role had been.

It was the start of a crash course in journalism that left the family dizzied. Maria says her "heart stood still" when she saw live footage of the crash site.

She next got a call from the pilots' union, which advised her to get out of Worcester.

Maria, 36, raced with her children to the family's timeshare in Somerset. But it wasn't long before reporters started calling. Others door-stepped her mother in Merseyside.

"It was hard not to get angry," Maria says. "But I understood that if they had something to work with they would back off."

Burkill, who is now 45, had been advised to stay at Heathrow on the night of the crash. Maria, alone and confused, began to resent her husband's absence. Meanwhile, reporters were desperate for new material.

Three days after the crash, with the family reunited, a Sunday paper ran a picture showing a young Burkill at a party, where he lay with a stick of licorice between his buttocks. "It wasn't pleasant," Maria says.

The story of Flight 38 quickly became one of character. Coward was cast as the new hero. Burkill became the George Clooney look-alike playboy who didn't even land the plane. It was a portrayal the pilot could bear, but then things got nasty.

Nine days after the crash, a newspaper, quoting unnamed "aviation experts", suggested Burkill had frozen at the controls. "I couldn't believe it," he says. "BA told me not to worry, but I knew everybody would read it." When Burkill returned to the air a month after the crash, cabin crew said BA trainers had repeated the rumour. Burkill felt like he could "do anything" after the crash. "My confidence was sky-high, but I was getting the horrible feeling that everything was against me."

Fearing he had lost the trust of his colleagues, he took sick leave. Back at home, the pilot fell into a hole of depression. "I'd take it out on the boys," he says. "I'd shout at Troy - really shout at him - just for being a normal 3-year-old."

"If there had been somewhere to take the children away from Pete's volatile moods, I would have gone," says Maria. "And I don't think I would have come back."

After an especially fierce row Maria confronted Burkill and dragged him out of his hole. Four months after the crash, he returned to work.

But the rumours still dogged him. Desperate, Burkill explained his torment in a letter to BA's chief executive.

He says the letter was never acknowledged. In the meantime, an official report revealed that a build-up of ice in fuel lines had caused the crash, and that the crew had averted a catastrophe.

But, as Maria puts it, "Pete couldn't imagine defending himself every time he went to work for a company he felt had failed him."

Last August Burkill took voluntary redundancy and left BA. He was confident he would find another job. But no airline would offer an interview.

He is still unemployed. Maria's career as an ambulance technician isn't enough to sustain their riverside home, which is now being sold.

Despite losing their dream, the couple is philosophical.

"When we bought this house we expected to be here forever," Maria says. "We've lost a lot, but what we will always have is a family."

- INDEPENDENT