It was a trip to New York, Seattle and San Francisco in 1997 with my boss.

We boarded the BA plane at Heathrow, and moments after take-off there were human screams and screams of twisted metal as I saw the bulkhead dividers shear in rotation against the movement of the fuselage.

There had been a bird strike in one of the engines, and it had caught fire quite spectacularly during takeoff.

Things calmed down a little as the Captain announced this, and fear turned to grumbling as he informed us that we would be circling over the English Channel to dump fuel and come back into land at Heathrow.

We did so and deplaned back into a welcome from BA ground staff with enough beverage vouchers for the entire manifest of passengers to get thoroughly drunk and get to know each other, which leads to a story for another day…

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