Today in 1982, British Airways Flight 009 made a successful landing in Jakarta, Indonesia – but getting there was the challenge, because along the way, ash from a nearby volcano had shut down all of the plane’s engines.
The plane was trying to fly from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Perth, Australia that night, when crew and passengers started to notice a smoky smell.
Then they noticed actual smoke coming in through the vents.
And when they looked out the windows, the plane’s four engines were glowing.
The crew called the captain, Eric Moody, back to the cockpit, and each those four glowing engines shut down, one by one, until there was no power to keep the plane in the air.
Captain Moody said later, with quite a bit of understatement, that the situation was “a little bit frightening.”
Without meaning to, the plane had flown through a cloud of volcanic ash from Indonesia’s Mount Galunggung, a volcano that up to that point hadn’t erupted since 1918.
The ash had clogged the plane’s engines; they later learned that it had even ground down the tips of the turbines.
But they didn’t know that at the time; Moody and his plane were at 37,000 feet with no engines over the Indian Ocean.
Fortunately the Captain kept his cool.
As the passengers’ oxygen masks dropped down, he said over the plane’s intercom, “Good evening ladies and gentlemen. This is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are all doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.”
Again, the understatement is off the charts here.
But, more amazingly, Moody did pretty much what he said he would do.
The captain used autopilot to put the plane on a slow descent, buying the crew time to restart the clogged engines.
And while three of them sputtered and coughed and never really got going, one of them worked just well enough to get the plane back on course to an airport in Jakarta.
There was one last big problem: the ash had also messed up the windscreen and the instruments, meaning Moody would have to land the plane with about two inches of visibility.
But he did it: the plane was safe, everybody on board was safe, and the investigation into what happened led to new safety measures to keep planes from being compromised by volcanic ash.
Moody continued to fly until his retirement in 1996.
After that, he gave a lot of talks encouraging pilots to learn the mechanics of flight and flying beyond computers and instruments, because sometimes that knowledge comes in handy.
Here’s another story of quick thinking: today in 2022, six brand-new high school graduates in Port Jefferson, New York had to quickly change out of their caps and gowns and duck out of the commencement ceremonies.
They were all members of the local volunteer fire department, which had gotten a call about a garage fire a half mile away.
Everybody at the ceremony understood, and, even better, the students put out that fire!
When volcanic ash stopped a Jumbo at 37,000ft (BBC)
These high school seniors raced away from graduation to fight a fire (Washington Post)
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Photo by G B_NZ – BA 747-200 G-BDXN at LHR, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikicommons