August 1st 1990 was blisteringly hot. In Liverpool the entire stock at a chocolate factory melted, and at a castle in Essex a waxwork knight turned into a puddle. It was so warm that the tarmac at Heathrow Airport was beginning to soften.

British Airways Flight 149 was scheduled to fly to Kuwait at 4.15pm. It would then refuel and carry on to Madras (now Chennai) in India, before embarking on the final leg to Kuala Lumpur. Under the ferocious blaze of the early afternoon sun, passengers at Heathrow boarded the Boeing 747 and began to find their seats. Shortly afterwards they were told there would be a slight delay: repairs were being carried out on a power unit in the aircraft’s tail which provided air conditioning.

After the unit was fixed, Richard Brunyate, the captain, decided that the passengers would need to wait a little while longer while he sought information on the situation 3,000 miles away in Kuwait. 

For almost two weeks the newspapers had been full of speculation that Saddam Hussein, the dictator who ruled Iraq, was about to invade his smaller neighbour. Desperate for cash after a gruelling eight-year war with Iran, Saddam accused Kuwait of driving down the value of Iraq’s oil by overproducing from its own wells, and issued a series of escalating demands and threats while moving troops to the border. Diplomats in Western capitals had convinced themselves that this was just bluster; Britain’s official position was that an invasion was not imminent.