It was no ordinary honeymoon. After boarding their flight in Canada on the evening of 23 August 2001, newlyweds Margaret McKinnon and her husband were heading for Lisbon, Portugal. As Air Transat flight 236 soared over the mid-Atlantic, McKinnon went to the lavatory. Nothing inside it was working. “It seemed odd,” she says, but she didn't think a lot of it.

Returning to her seat, the crew served breakfast, but then announced that they would be making an emergency landing. She remembers thinking it seemed early to be arriving in Lisbon. “I didn't really understand at the time what that meant,” she says. She soon found out. Crew instructed passengers to put on their life jackets. The lights flickered, then extinguished. The cabin depressurised. Oxygen masks deployed.

The plane’s systems had shut down after a catastrophic leakage of fuel. “They were shouting that we would be ditching into the ocean,” McKinnon recalls.

After a half hour of preparing for the worst, McKinnon recalls somebody yelling that they’d made it to land. It was the Azores, an isolated archipelago some 850 miles (1,360km) off the Portuguese coast. The pilots had established contact with Lajes, a joint military-civilian air base. Following a harrowing 360 degree spin and several sharp turns to reduce altitude, the crew shouted “brace, brace, brace” as the officers brought the plane to a bumpy landing. Fires licked across the plane’s wheels.