FORGET playing paintball. Companies are sending staff to experience a plane crash in simulators run by British Airways as the ultimate team-building exercise.

For £130 a head, employees are taken to a hangar at Heathrow where they board a shortened version of a Boeing 737 mounted on a motion platform.

After “takeoff”, they are plunged into darkness and put into a nose-dive from 3,000ft as the cabin begins to fill with smoke.

Once the plane has hit the ground, the “passengers” have to get out as fast as they can through the front and rear exits. By this stage, the employees are so pumped up that on three separate occasions businessmen have shorn through a half-inch steel bolt by hand so as to lift a 45lb overhead escape hatch and climb onto the plane’s wing.

The half-day “crash courses” are so popular that BA has taken more than 350 bookings from about 8,500 oil executives, bankers, civil servants and staff at the Football Association.

Demand has increased in the past month in the wake of a US Airways Airbus A320 hitting a flock of birds above New York and ditching into the Hudson River. All 155 people on board survived.

Andy Clubb, the customer services manager who runs the BA courses, said: “Most companies buy it for team-bonding purposes, as well as it being a safety exercise.

“The adrenaline kicks in and they all bond together because they go through a stressful environment.”

The passengers have to use oxygen masks in a decompressed cabin, crawl on the floor in a heated, darkened smoke chamber, put on lifejackets and launch themselves down emergency chutes.

Sharon Rynders, head of the chief scientist’s office at BP, who has been on the course, said: “It gets ugly when you know you have to get out of somewhere. The think-of-yourself-first mentality still exists.

“The adrenaline certainly kicks in when smoke fills the cabin and you have to crawl on the floor.”

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