Pilot crawled along ceiling to save RAF death plunge plane
AN RAF plane that nosedived 4,400 feet in less than 30 seconds was saved by its pilot – despite the brave serviceman suffering a broken back.
Flight Lieutenant Nathan Jones crawled along the Voyager aircraft’s ceiling to reach its controls.
The harrowing incident was caused when co-pilot Flt Lt Andrew Townshend, from Longdon, Rugeley, took his digital camera into the cockpit.
This week the 49-year-old won an appeal against his dismissal from the RAF – punishment imposed at a court martial last March.
Townshend caused the plane, carrying 187 passengers, to plunge by putting his camera down in an unsafe place. It jammed in the controls, disengaging the auto-pilot.
Last year’s court martial was told he was “bored” and “practising taking photographs” when his camera fell.
The drama unfolded in 2014 over the Black Sea while Flt Lt Jones left the controls to get a cuppa.
The Voyager had taken off from RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, and was travelling to Camp Bastion, Afghanistan.
The wild dive left 48 passengers unfit for duty and cost the RAF millions of pounds. The service was forced to ground its entire fleet of six Voyager carriers while the cause was investigated.
That led to servicemen being stranded in Afghanistan.
Flt Lt Jones, aged 34, saved the lives of those on board despite suffering a fractured back, prolapsed disc, nerve damage and gashes to his head and fingers.
It was a catalogue of injuries that forced him to be downgraded by the RAF.
Everyone on board believed they were going to die, he said.
Despite his injuries, Flt Lt Jones, from Colwyn Bay, has continued to compete and win medals in his chosen sport – skiing.
He has twice competed in the Invictus Games, an Olympics for injured servicemen, winning bronze in Orlando and captaining Team GB in Ontario last year.
During the Canada games, the Daily Telegraph described the action man as a friend of Prince Harry, the Royal behind the military sporting extravaganza.
Flt Lt Jones’ tally of trophies also includes two inter-service skiing titles won in 2015.
At the court martial, he graphically described the struggle to save his plane – and the shocking scenes as it dropped to the ground. “It felt like a rumble, a bit of turbulence, and then suddenly I hit the roof,” said the pilot based at Brize Norton.
“I then crawled along the ceiling. The doorway into the cockpit is lower than the ceiling so I had to climb through the opening.
“Then, when I got into cockpit, that was when I everything was pitch-black.
“I could see we were going into the sea or something very dark. the saw “There were a lot of flashing lights in the cockpit, everything was stuck to the ceiling and Flt Lt Townshend was shouting ‘Get back into your seat, I can’t get the auto pilot out!’. “The aircraft was violently shaking. I had never experienced anything like that before.” Flt Lt Jones said he gently pulled back on the controls as he was “aware that if I pulled back hard it would most likely snap the wings off ”. Voyager ZZ333 was landed in Incirlik, Turkey, where the injured were treated and the plane inspected. Exhaustive tests included X-rays of the captain’s stick assembly and assessments of cosmic radiation measurements to see whether fac to rs other than the camera had affected the aircraft’s fly-by-w ire computers.