A near-death hijacking, superstar passengers and my 44 happy years of turbulence
THE first Charmaine McCall-Hagan knew there was anything wrong with the plane was when the sound of the engine changed. It was December 29, 2000, and she was a passenger on a British Airways flight from London to Nairobi.
Her husband Bill, the flight’s captain, was in the cockpit, and their two children Alanna and Aiden, then 14 and eight, were sleeping beside her.
A veteran member of cabin crew who had spent 30 years in the skies, Charmaine knew instantly the flight was in trouble. Nearly 17 years later, the sound still haunts her.
‘I still sometimes hear that drone of the engine,’ she says. ‘Because you have that moment. Those first seconds where you know there’s something drastically wrong.’
There was. Unbeknown to most of the passengers, which included the singer Bryan Ferry and socialite Jemima Khan – who was travelling with her brother Ben, her children Kasim and Sulaiman and her mother Lady Annabel Goldsmith – a hijacker had stormed the cockpit, grabbing the plane’s controls and attempting to drive the aircraft into the ground.
As the hijacker, a mentally ill Kenyan, tussled with the first officer the plane stalled and Captain Hagan leapt in, jabbing the hijacker in the eyes with his fingers.
He later disclosed that his young son, with typical childhood curiosity, had asked him only a few days earlier what he would do if he were ever attacked by a shark.
‘It was just at the time as we were going down that I got the inspiration to gouge him with my finger,’ he recalled.
Back in the cabin seatbelt signs flashed, passengers screamed and prayed, and the cabin lights went out. The plane plunged towards the ground losing 12,000ft in 25 seconds – the highest rate of descent from which any civilian aircraft has ever recovered. Three seconds longer and it would have flipped over and crashed.
‘I was most concerned about my children,’ says Charmaine. ‘They were just looking at me and I was screaming at them to stay in their seats. For that moment it was horrible. But then after a minute we started to climb back up again and everything was back to normal.’
With the help of two passengers the hijacker, now sporting two black eyes, was tied up and restrained until the flight landed. Charmaine’s husband came on to the intercom and announced, cool as a cucumber: ‘This is your Captain, Captain Hagan. We will be travelling on to Nairobi.’
As Khan later recalled: ‘Everyone hugged everyone. Passengers slugged vodkas from upturned trolleys.
‘Someone lit a ciggie and an injured air hostess on her back in the aisle announced: “This is a no-smoking flight.”’
Ferry apparently kept shouting at his son to stop swearing while several passengers whose nerves had got the better of them requested tracksuit bottoms.
Charmaine, however, could not celebrate until she had seen her husband.
‘When it all settled down I said to the crew I’d just like to nip up to the cockpit and see if my husband was OK,’ she says. ‘The cockpit door was open and he just turned round and gave me the thumbs up and I knew he was fine. That was it. He said he was OK, and then we were OK.’
She shrugs and smiles. ‘It wasn’t the best flight we’ve had.’ It is this grace under pressure that has made not just Captain Hagan, who later received a Polaris Award for his actions, but his wife Charmaine a legend of the skies.
This week she retired at the age of 65, Britain’s longest serving member of cabin crew after an astounding 44 years in the air. Immaculately dressed with dulcet tones and a broad warm smile she is the epitome of the capable air stewardess.
In 44 years she’s seen and done it all, mostly at 30,000ft. From serving drinks to Hollywood stars to keeping passengers calm during terrifying turbulence, Charmaine could – and probably should – write a book on the changing world of the ‘trolley dolly’.
Certainly, it was a rather more glamorous business when Charmaine started out in the 1970s. As a schoolgirl growing up in Glasgow she was captivated by the glittering world of aviation and wanted nothing more than to become an air hostess.
‘I was so attracted to the excitement of it, the destinations, the glamour, it just looked marvellous. I left school and just thought, “I’m going to do this”.’
Back then BA would not hire anyone under the age of 21, but Charmaine was so keen she started writing to the company aged 17 asking if they would take her on.
‘Each year they’d write back and say “sorry, you’re too young, keep trying”,’ she laughs. Finally in 1973 they hired her. She was ecstatic. ‘It was the only thing I’d ever wanted to do,’ she says. ‘I was thrilled.’ Her training took six weeks, at the end of which she went to London to take part in a catwalk with a group of other air stewardesses in order to ‘learn how to walk’.
‘It was like a finishing school,’ she says. ‘You were kitted out in your uniform and then you would learn how to walk up and down, learn not to slouch and have good posture. They’d give you make-up advice and show you how to tie your hair back.’
SENT off to Glasgow as cabin crew on domestic routes around the UK, her first flight was from Glasgow to Belfast. ‘I was nervous and excited, and petrified of doing the cabin address. It was all new to me and I was young. I wanted to hide behind the curtain.’
It was a time when an air stewardess’s uniform rivalled the outfits seen on high fashion models. Charmaine’s uniform included a hat and white gloves that had to be kept pristine at all times.
She remembers once getting into trouble for leaving her gloves in a hotel room after attempting to wash them. Everything about air travel back then had a whiff of exclusivity and class, something in which Charmaine revelled.
‘It was more of an event, getting on a plane back then. It’s not like today where people just jump on and go where they like. We carried a lot of well-heeled passengers, particularly on flights down to London for those going on to Concorde,’ she says.
The food, too, was something else. ‘It was a proper meal,’ she says. ‘The breakfast we used to serve on the BA shuttle from Glasgow to London was like a club breakfast – the full works with tea, coffee, marmalade, jam… Now it’s a cup of tea and a biscuit. And you have to pay for it.’
Charmaine spent the majority of her career on domestic flights around the UK, working every service from the Glasgow to London route to Orkney to Shetland.
It was also how she met her husband Bill, then a pilot flying the Glasgow to Belfast route. ‘I just got on a plane one morning and there he was, and we started chatting. That was it.’
While being married to a pilot may sound like a busman’s holiday, Charmaine says they have worked out a routine over the years.
‘We’ve very rarely been on the same flight,’ she says. ‘That’s made it easier with the kids. And we both love to travel so we’ve been able to do a lot of that. When he started flying long haul we would often go with him and then stay for a few days. I
remember the kids complaining, “I don’t want to go to LA again”.’
Her years in the sky have certainly given her the opportunity to encounter plenty of celebrities. There was the late footballer George Best, whom she served several times flying from Glasgow to London. ‘He didn’t take a drink. Not once did he take a drink,’ she reveals. ‘He was just very quiet and unassuming, and didn’t want any special attention.’
There were various Royals – Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, Princess Eugenie (‘a beautiful girl’) – who were all, as you might imagine, the epitome of good manners.
There was Hollywood A-lister Charlize Theron, who kept her baseball cap on during a flight from Edinburgh to London. ‘She didn’t want anyone to see her at all,’ she says. ‘She was just hiding, sitting in her seat the whole time.’
Perhaps Charmaine’s favourite was Richard Attenborough, who had just finished filming the 1994 remake of Miracle on 34th Street, in which he played Father Christmas. ‘He was in the front row and as he was leaving up he kissed me on the cheek and said “Oh, you are a sweetie”. I could go home and tell the kids, “I’ve just been kissed by Santa Claus”.’
In her later years she opted to go long-haul and spent several happy years working first-class cabins on BA flights to Delhi, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town.
She revelled in the opportunity to travel, often spending several nights in a destination before flying back. ‘New York was for shopping, Cape Town for sightseeing, India for a massage,’ she says. ‘It was fantastic. What other job in the world pays you to go and look at Sugarloaf Mountain, or the statue of Christ?’
It is difficult for her to pinpoint a highlight, but her family’s nearbrush with death is ultimately what stands out for her the most.
‘That’s the big one,’ she says. ‘The fact we walked away. That was the lottery winner. It was luck. And skill from my husband.’
She’s not the only one who feels that way. The Goldsmiths were so grateful they had the couple round to dinner to say thank you, and the Hagans still receive a Christmas card from the family every year.
She admits it takes a certain type of person to be a member of cabin crew. ‘You have to love passengers and speak to them and treat them as you would want to be treated.
‘You have to be a bit of everything. You have to be compassionate, a nursemaid, you might have a passenger come on and have a bereavement or be diabetic, they might be an alcoholic and you have to work round that and say OK, it’s not a good day. When that light goes on, people just want to be looked after. And that’s what you have to do.’
She has worked a number of planes carrying bodies home, their loved ones often on board as passengers. ‘You just have to show as much respect as you can and do all you can for them,’ she says.
And she has always had a particular soft spot for servicemen, particularly those coming home on leave from war zones. ‘One time we had a lovely boy on in his uniform and he took his cap off and gave it to the skipper,’ she says. ‘That’s what happens if you look after people.’
She finished her career with Loganair, flying the same routes as she did as a young woman, and as her final flight took off from Kirkwall in Orkney she was given a water cannon arch by the airport fire staff, a rare honour.
‘I sat in the cockpit with tears streaming down my face. It’s time to go, but I will miss the job so much.’ Her only regret in 44 years is that she never managed a flight to Barra, famous as the only place where scheduled flights use a beach as the runway.
Now she’s retired, however, she might just get there on holiday.