Original subtitles

High above the Indian Ocean disaster strikes.

The engine's on fire.

More than 10 kilometers in the air

all 4 engines of a British Airways 747 stop working.

Roger, declare emergency.

Mayday, mayday, mayday. Speedbird 9.

With no engines and little power,

British Airways flight 9 falls towards the ocean.

The crew fights to keep their plane

from crashing into the sea.

What has crippled their massive jet,

threatening the lives of everyone onboard?

June the 24th, 1982.

British Airways flight 9 cruises through the sky over Indonesia.

In a few hours, the plane and all 2-hundred and 63 people

onboard are scheduled to land in Perth, Australia.

Phyllis Welch and her daughter are seated in cabin E

at the very back of the enormous jet.

How's that heroine of yours, Fanny Price, faring?

Oh she's having a tough old time at Mansfield Park.

It's a good place for me to spend a few hours.

Wouldn't mind being there myself.

It's all right, mum. We'll get there.

We had already traversed at least 2 time zones.

We were very tired.

We had flown through Bombay, through Kuala Lumpur,

hadn't been able to get much sleep if any and it

was a dark, dark pitch black night.

Ahead of Betty

and Phyllis, Charles Capewell is returning

home to Perth, Australia with his two boys, Chas and Stephen.

All right, settle down lads. Time for a nap.

Get back to your seat. No.

What, do you want to sleep here? All right.

It was a good flight. It was going well.

Uh leaving London was great and we was all eager to go home

and the two boys were eager to get back to mum.

I thought we'll be home in three hours to Perth.

They'll be back and we'll get in a taxi and be home.

While many of the passengers have been

traveling for almost a day, the crew is fresh.

They took control at the last stopover in Kuala Lumpur.

Captain Eric Moody got his first taste of flying at the age

of 16 when he took a gliding lesson.

He was one of the first ever trained on the 747.

Roger, check with Jakarta.

Jakarta control,

speedbird 9 over Halim at level 3-7-0.

Speedbird 9, Roger.

07 First officer Roger Greaves has been

a co-pilot for more than 6 years.

Barrie Townley-Freeman has been a flight engineer on these

aircraft for just a little longer.

I'd not flown with Eric before or Barrie

and that was the first time we'd actually,

we'd actually met on that uh that flight.

As the jet flies over the city of Jakarta,

it's cruising at more than 11-thousand meters

and has been in the air for an hour and a half.

Captain Moody checks his weather radar.

It shows smooth sailing for the next 5-hundred kilometers.

All right Roger, it's all clear. Just keep your eyes open.

I'll be back in a moment. Just gotta use the loo.

Back in the cabin,

many of the passengers have fallen asleep.

While Charles Capewell and his sons doze,

an ominous haze appears above their heads.

It' s still legal to smoke on passenger jets in 1982.

For the cabin crew though the smoke seems thicker than normal.

There seems to be a lot of smoke out there.

They begin to worry that a small fire may be

smoldering somewhere on the plane.

Maybe someone lit up in the toilet.

Let's go see if we can find it.

A fire at 11-thousand meters is a terrifying prospect.

If there is a blaze somewhere

the crew must find it immediately.

In the cockpit, the flight takes an unsettling turn.

Barrie and I were just sitting there minding

the shop, pitch dark night of course and then we started

to get these pinpricks of light on the, on the windscreen.

St Elmo's fire? I don't think so.

Saint Elmo's fire is a natural phenomenon that's

sometimes seen when planes fly through

highly charged thunderclouds.

But there aren't supposed to be any thunderclouds tonight.

Anything on the radar? No, no it's clear.

I don't like the look of this.

Let's get a better look out there.

With the help of their landing lights, the two

men are disturbed to see a thin layer of cloud surrounding

their plane even though nothing is showing up on their radar.

But at 37-thousand feet,

the normal thing you would anticipate would be high

serous which is just a thin layer of cloud.

I think we better get the captain back up here.

I was reading my book and there was a slight

flick of turbulence, just a slight flick and I glanced over

to the left where I had a clear view of the port wing and to

my surprise it was covered in a brilliant white shimmering light

which seemed to be clinging to the wing of the aircraft.

I carried on reading but I found that I kept reading the same

paragraph over and over again and not taking in a word of it.

I just didn't know what was happening.

In the cabin, the smoke begins to thicken.

Stewards have been unable to figure out

where it's coming from.

If there's a fire, they can't find it.

Eh? All right,

well go see that the passengers are comfortable.

Do you smell anything odd mum?

Seems rather smoky in here.

I noticed that thick smoke was

pouring into the cabin through the vents above the windows

and that was a very sobering sight.

Turkish cigarettes?

It smelt like sort of a sulfuric electrical smell

and I went on that flight deck expecting to hear that we

had some electrical smoke somewhere from the aircraft

but nothing was further from the truth.

When did it start?

Just after you stepped out.

Anything on radar?

No, it's clear, not a cloud.

Oh my lord. Look at engine four! It's lit up somehow.

Captain, captain have a look at number one.

It's the same on my side.

None of the crew have ever seen anything

like this before but the light show is just the beginning.

Their bizarre flight is about to take a terrifying

turn for the worse.

Strange lights are striking the windshield

of a British Airways passenger jet heading to Perth, Australia.

At the same time,

the plane's engines are lit by a brilliant white glow.

Look at engine four! It's lit up somehow.

This light show if you like had become more intense.

In fact we ended up sitting there with two

sheets of brilliant white light in front of us

in place of the windscreens.

Inside the cabin, smoke has been growing thicker.

Chief steward Graham Skinner has been organizing an intense

but quiet search for fire.

What's with all the smoke?

There was smoke in the cabin.

It got really, really hot.

You were perspiring, literally drenched in perspiration and

the acrid smoke was at the back of your throat, up your nose,

in your eyes and you're rubbing this and your eyes are running

and it was, oh it was not, not a very nice situation at all.

Flight engineer Barrie Townley-Freeman has been

checking his instruments carefully.

He's smelled the smoke but so far has no indication that

there's a fire in any of the plane's systems.

Can't find anything.

With one mystery confronting them,

they are suddenly faced with a frightening new situation.

Dad! Dad! The engine's on fire!

The whole of the wing was a sheet of light

and I thought well and I said oh you better close that

because we don't know what's happened.

Chas, sit down. Stephen, close that blind.

Then I realized that, you know,

something was dramatically wrong.

There were huge flames coming out of the back

of the engines, 20, some people said 40 feet long.

These huge jets of sheer flame shooting

out of the back of all the engines.

Is it going to penetrate from the outside of the aircraft?

Is it going to come in to the cabin?

Are we going to burn to death?

Are we going to choke to death on the smoke?

What's going to happen? What's causing it?

What are they going to do about it?

As fire engulfs the engines, one of them

revs loudly and flames out.

Engine failure, number four.

Fire action, number four.

Checklist power and gear. Set.

Thrust lever. Closed.

Start lever. Off.

Once one engine fails you call for

the drill to shut that one down.

You have drills for certain things so that you don't have,

you don't fly together as a crew forever.

You can fly with different people then

but you can standardize the operations.

The instruments do not indicate a fire on the plane,

but the passengers can see flames erupting

from the engines and stretching down the length of the 747.

I could not see the engines

from where I was sitting.

I could only see the space behind them

but there was enough glow in that space to convince me

that the aircraft was really seriously on fire.

We were in trouble.

They knew, as young as they were,

they knew we were in bad, bad trouble and they sort

of just looked at me enough to say well what do we do now dad?

If anything's gonna happen,

I want to be close to you. Oh please.

The cabin crew begins storing anything that's loose.

They don't want dishes or bottles

flying around the cabin if the plane begins to dive.

Don't worry. It's just friction.

If I was misleading them then that was for a reason

because I didn't want them to get as upset as I felt.

I just couldn't believe it and, you know, all this is going

through my mind and yet I'm chatting to the passengers and

chatting to the crew and saying oh yeah nothing to worry about.

Yeah it's just a little hiccup, you know.

The 747 is more than 10 kilometers above the ocean.

Its engines appear to be burning,

and peculiar smoke continues to fill the cabin.

And then the unthinkable happens.

Number two engine's gone.

All right then. Begin the engine shutdown.

No wait! They've all gone.

All four engines have failed.

The other three went out almost immediately

and that's when it begins to be a serious emergency.

Those engines made a grating rumbling sound

almost like a cement mixer and then gradually the noise

just disappeared and they became silent.

In a minute and half we've gone from 4 engines

running normally to having none.

The 747 has plenty of fuel.

Yet somehow all four of the jet's engines have

completely stopped working.

Roger, declare emergency. Mayday, mayday, mayday.

Speedbird 9 we have lost all 4 engines out of 3-7-0.

Mayday, mayday, mayday.

Speedbird 9 we have lost all 4 engines out...

With no engine power

and no idea what has crippled their plane,

British Airways flight 9 begins falling from the sky.

Jakarta control. Speedbird 9.

We have lost all 4 engines now out of 3-6-0.

First officer Roger Greaves issues a mayday

but he has trouble getting his message across.

Have you got a problem? Jakarta control.

Speedbird 9. We have lost all 4 engines. Repeat all 4 engines.

Now descending through flight level 3-5-0.

Speedbird 9, you have lost number four engine?

This idiot doesn't understand! Jakarta control.

Speedbird 9. We have lost all 4 engines. Repeat all 4 engines.

Now descending through flight level 3-5-0.

The, the air traffic control at Jakarta

unfortunately seemed to have a slight

problem in understanding what we actually were saying.

Only when another plane nearby relays

the mayday call do controllers in Jakarta understand.

Now descending through flight level 3-5-0.

Speedbird 9, all 4 engines out. Understood. Standing by.

As far as the crew knows no 747 had ever lost

power to all of its engines before.

The crew has to find out why it's happening, now.

I think we've cocked something up.

We were concerned and worried that we'd done

something wrong, you know, to cause the whole thing.

All three of us felt exactly the same and it

was, it was a personal guilt in the sense of what have I missed?

What have I done wrong?

Because, you know, this kind of thing doesn't happen.

While not built for gliding,

even without its engines a 747 can travel

forward 15 kilometers for every kilometer it drops.

With no power, flight 9 has started a long, slow fall.

Some 10 kilometers above the ocean, the crew has

less than half an hour before they smash into the sea.

When they all stop you go into automatic mode.

Obviously we had practiced this drill on the simulator many,

many times and that's very good

and all very well as long as when it happens to you

for real, what happens on the airplane is mirrored by what

happens to you in the simulator, and I'm afraid that wasn't so.

In the simulator, when all 4 engines stop,

the autopilot turns off.

But high above the Indian Ocean, Captain Moody sees

that his autopilot is still on.

We were all three confused and concerned that what was

happening to us wasn't what we'd been told would happen to us.

All right, begin restart drill set.

In the heat of the situation,

they have no time to figure out why the autopilot is still on.

On. Anything? Anything?

No. Again.

All right then. From the top. Battery.

Check. On.

Cross-feed valves. Open.

Fire switch. In.

The standard restart drill

takes up to three minutes to complete.

Plunging from the sky, the crew has fewer than ten chances

to get their engines going before they run out of time.

Come on. Again gentlemen.

All right. From the top. Battery.

Check. On.

Cross feed valves? Open.

Fire switch? In.

At 10-thousand meters,

Captain Eric Moody decides to turn the plane

back toward the closest airport, Halim, just outside Jakarta.

But even that is too far away

if he can't get at least some of the engines going again.

Jakarta, speedbird 9 turning left,

back to Halim out of 300.

Speedbird 9, radar cannot see you. Squawk Alpha 7700.

Air traffic control asks them

to transmit the emergency transponder signal.

Jakarta, speedbird 9. We are already squawking 7700.

Now the crew is flying back to an airport that

can't find them on radar.

Without the constant rumble of the engines, the cabin is quiet.

Some of the passengers feel the plane beginning to descend.

But without communication from the cockpit,

they can only guess.

The quietness was unbelievable 'cause it

was sort of, the airplane was no engines, nothing.

It seemed to be eerie, you know, a bit surreal really

because like as if you was in, suspended in space or something.

All we could feel was this quietness

and the whimpering from the few people that were really upset.

Some people were sitting quite rigidly almost as

if they hadn't noticed anything.

At first it was, it was sheer fear

and then after a while it turns to acceptance.

You know you're going to die. We knew we were going to die.

What's going on? What's the problem?

It's just a technical fault.

I've been through much worse, let me tell you.

Everything will be fine.

I think if I'd have sat down

and really thought of exactly what was happening

I don't think I would have ever got up again.

One steward came up to us

and said are you two ladies all right and yes we said we're

fine which was an absolute lie but that's how it was.

It seemed absolutely vital not to panic.

Captain Moody can't restart the engines

unless he can keep the plane flying between 2-hundred

and 50 and 2-hundred and 70 knots.

But the airspeed indicators aren't working.

Captain, I've got 3-hundred

and 20 knots on my side.

Well I've got 2-70.

Bloody hell! It's a 50 knot difference.

I'll change the speed.

Falling from the sky with no engine power,

the crew now have no idea how fast they're going.

But to have the best chance to restart the engines,

Captain Moody has to have the plane flying at the right speed.

So from that point onwards,

Eric then varied the speed through,

through uh just about a hundred knot range hoping that at

some point or other coincidental with us putting the fuel

into the engines that we would actually be at the right speed.

To change speeds,

Captain Moody turns the autopilot off.

Then he slowly pulls the nose of the jet up to slow it

and then pushes it down to increase his speed.

The upsetting rollercoaster movement

adds to the panic felt in the cabin.

At one time the aircraft developed a strange motion.

It seemed to be climbing steeply and then diving down.

That was the sensation we got

and a bucking action that was so violent that we felt

it could break the aircraft up in the air.

Pressure warning captain. We're at 10-thousand.

Pressure warning? That's, that's not supposed to do that.

And a warning horn went off.

Now this didn't ever happen on the simulator in this

exercise so it was a bit of a surprise to us.

As well as providing electrical power,

the engines on a jumbo jet help keep the cabin pressurized.

With the engines not working of course,

the air wasn't being pumped in so gradually

the pressure was leaking away.

With all 4 engines gone,

the pressurized air is rapidly seeping out.

The thinning level of oxygen makes passengers gasp.

The crew reach for their oxygen masks,

but first officer Greaves can't get his mask to work.

My oxygen mask,

yeah that was a problem I could have done without.

It was stowed above my head and when I pulled the oxygen

mask down, the mask and the tube became separated.

The captain must make a difficult choice.

If he continues to descend slowly, it will get

increasingly difficult for first officer Greaves to breathe.

I said look if we get down to 20-thousand feet quickly,

we can all take our oxygen masks off and we can talk

and we're back as a crew again.

We had to actually increase

the rate of descent to descend to a lower altitude quicker,

which in the circumstances was something that we wouldn't

really have chosen to do.

So then I dived the airplane

and got rid of about 6-thousand feet in a minute.

The loss of cabin pressure

and the steep dive have another terrifying consequence.

The things shot down.

They sort of dangle down in front of you

and I looked to see if Stephen had got his

and Chas had pulled his out of the socket.

So I made sure that Chas got his oxygen.

I seen a few movies on planes and, you know,

once that happens you're in serious trouble.

Help me. Yeah here we go.

Breathe normally mum, not deeply. Breathe calmly.

The oxygen masks came down and we put those to our

faces as had been described in the drill which fortunately

we had been observing at the beginning of the flight

but it seemed that the oxygen supply was not working.

Is yours working?

No, I'm not getting anything.

The cabin crew try to use the public address

system to explain what's going on.

But it's not working.

Chief Steward Graham Skinner makes do with a low-tech backup.

Can you hear me?

We're having a small problem with the public address

system so if you would, place your masks over your mouth

and nose and breathe normally.

As the passengers struggle with their masks,

Captain Eric Moody is running out of options.

If his engines don't start soon,

he'll have to turn his jet around

and try landing on the open ocean.

High above the Indian Ocean,

the seemingly impossible has occurred.

All 4 engines on a British Airways 747

have stopped working, and the crew has no idea why.

First officer Roger Greaves manages to fix his broken oxygen

mask but he's still frustrated by engines that won't start.

Ready? Set.

Battery? Check. On.

Standby power? On.

Anything? Come on, anything?

No. All right then.

Let's do it from the top. Battery?

Check. On.

First officer Greaves

and engineer Barrie Townley-Freeman have

actually shortened the standard restart drill.

It's giving them more chances to get the engines going

but so far nothing's working.

Come on, you old sod.

The process that we were going through the whole

time was just continuous.

We hadn't had any success with the drill at all,

despite all the efforts we were putting in.

But it was, it was the only thing

we had left to cling onto so that's what we did.

From the top again. Battery?

Check. On.

I have no idea, I don't think any of have,

how many times we tried to restart those engines.

If I say twenty I would think that's too low.

If I say fifty I would think that's probably about right.

As the plane falls lower and lower,

Captain Moody faces a brutal choice.

A mountain range cuts across the island of Java

between his plane and the airport.

He knows he has to be

at least 35-hundred meters high to clear it.

But if his engines don't restart soon, they won't make it.

At this rate, it will crash in a matter of minutes.

It's just a question of where.

Captain Moody decides if the engines don't restart soon,

he'll turn back toward the ocean and try landing on the water.

All right, are we getting something?

It's not starting.

I knew it was so difficult to land

airplanes on the sea even when you had everything going for you

and I thought well we haven't got much going for us here.

I'd never done it before.

Hiding his concern,

Captain Moody addresses the passengers and crew.

Ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking.

We have a small problem. All 4 engines have stopped.

We are doing our damnedest to get it under control.

I trust you are not in too much distress.

Most of the passengers expect the worst.

Ma, in trouble. Plane going down.

Will do best for the boys. We love you. Sorry. Pa.

I thought we were going down,

heading for the ocean to crash.

And I thought if she got the note, you know, know, she knew

we were still thinking about her and we did whatever we could.

Will we be burnt alive, will we be

choked by the smoke or will the aircraft break up in the air

and hurdle us out into space, which was my biggest fear.

Or will we come down in the sea

and be eaten by sharks alive, or will we crash into a mountain?

Let's crash into a mountain quickly and get all this over.

Well? Nothing.

It's not starting. All right.

From the top then. Battery? Check. On.

Standby power? On.

Finally, Captain Moody has to decide to carry on,

and likely crash into the mountains or turn around

and ditch into the sea.

I don't know how to swim.

I couldn't swim anyway so I thought well,

you know, I'm doomed anyway

and I'll just hope maybe one of the passengers might help

the two boys to make sure that they could stay afloat.

Well? Anything? No!

All right then. From the top again. Battery?

We had very few chances left of starting the engines

before having to turn out to sea again because we wouldn't have

been able to clear the mountains on the south coast of Java.

I can't remember... I can't swim.

Start lever? Cut off!

Fuel pressure? Ah, available.

Standby ignition on.

And then as suddenly as it had stopped working,

the fourth engine roars back to life.

Engine four back on line!

Then all of a sudden there was this sort of like

somebody had given the airplane a punch from underneath

and then I realized that it might have been an engine.

It was a boom. Oh my god!

The noise that a Rolls Royce engine makes when it

starts up is a low rumbling noise, ya know and it

was ah it was just, well it was wonderful to hear it.

A 747 can fly with one engine

but Captain Moody knows that just one engine still won't

give him enough power to clear the mountains.

The glass now is half full. It's not half empty.

We're now in with a real chance

and I tell you what the three of us

would have dragged that airplane around the whole island of Java.

As the plane falls past 4-thousand meters,

another engine coughs and comes back to life.

Engine 3 back on line!

It's followed quickly by the final two.

I don't believe it.

Engines 1 and 2 both back on line!

From almost certain disaster,

the crippled jet is now under full power.

Oh my god mum.

I realized then that we could make it back to,

not to Perth but to an airport.

That's all we wanted, was to land on the earth and,

you know, be part of the living again 'cause

while we were up there we were dead.

Jakarta, speedbird 9. We are back in business.

All 4 running - all 4 running...

This time, local controllers have no trouble

understanding the message.

Speedbird 9. All 4 engines serviceable again.

Confirm continuing to Halim. Affirmative, affirmative.

We say right, let's get this thing

on the ground as quickly as we can.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.

We seem to have overcome that problem

and have managed to start all the engines.

We are diverting to Jakarta

and expect to land in about fifteen minutes.

Captain Moody begins climbing, putting

plenty of room between his plane and the mountains below.

But as he does, the strange lights that he saw

when the crisis began reappear in front of the jet.

Now as soon as we got to 15-thousand feet this

St Elmo's fire started again.

Now I'm not slow so I thought let's get out of here quickly.

But before he can descend very far,

the plane is stricken again.

Engine 2 is surging. Oh no, not again!

The whole airplane was shaking.

It was just going bang, bang, bang.

The atmosphere in the cabin

was very tense and very quiet.

By then I think very few people were talking.

I think there were quite a lot of prayers going up.

The engines backfire violently.

The captain must make another fateful decision.

Begin shutdown drill.

Checklist power and gear. Off.

Thrust lever. Closed.

Well we were reluctant to do it

as you can probably understand but, you know, that was it

so we were back on three engines.

Now I'm not a coward but when you've had four

engines going, no engines going, you get four going and tell

me, show me any pilot that will quickly shut down that engine

'cause you're worried that they're all gonna stop again.

Jakarta, speedbird 9. Leaving 150 for 120.

We are now on three engines.

As the plane closes in on the airport,

first officer Greaves thinks the windshield is

covered in moisture, making it hard to see through.

And I said, I said to Eric,

I said it's a bit misty out there.

So we turned, turned the blowers on to kind of, you know,

like demisters on your car to try and uh clear that.

That didn't work.

I used the windscreen wipers and that didn't work.

Somehow the glass itself has been badly damaged.

For some unknown reason I looked out

the edge of my windscreen and about a two inch

strip down the edge on the left hand side I could see much

more clearly but I couldn't see anything much out the front.

It was getting more and more opaque the nearer

and nearer we got to the lights.

The crew get a final unwelcome surprise.

Equipment on the ground that helps them

descend at the proper angle isn't working.

Jakarta ATC. Cleared for procedure. Turn over the beacon.

Be advised our glide path is unserviceable.

The localizer which gives you the left

and right of the runway centre line, that was working but

the glide slope which gives you the actual profile

for the descent was not working.

After all the troubles they've been through,

now the crew has to land their plane manually.

We then continued with Eric flying the localizer and me

calling out the distance and the altitude that he should be at.

Three hundred feet captain.

So he was then able to adjust his rate of descent to

what I was telling him as far as the glide slope was concerned.

Two hundred, one hundred and fifty feet captain.

One hundred. Fifty feet. Thirty feet.

Dad, we're on the runway. Reverse.

Ninety knots, eighty knots.

We're down. I could really go for a cold soda.

The airplane just landed itself.

It seemed to anyway, kiss the earth. It was beautiful.

That's, that's amazing.

Safely on the ground at Halim airport in Jakarta,

passengers celebrate the end of a harrowing ordeal.

They also want to know what happened.

No fire had been found so why had smoke filled the cabin?

How could all four engines have stopped at nearly the same time?

What were the strange lights that surrounded the plane?

In the cockpit, the flight crew are relieved

but also concerned that they might be at fault.

The first thing that we did having parked

the airplane and shut it all down um was to then go

through all the paperwork to see if there was possibly anything

anywhere in it that might have given us any pre-warning

of some sort of phenomenon that caused what happened to us.

It's gonna, it's gonna come back to us.

The damage to the 747 is extensive.

From the outside, the crew realize

that their windshield has been deeply scratched.

They see bare metal showing through where the paint has

somehow been stripped away.

And they still have no idea why any of it happened.

When investigators uncover the cause of the disaster,

flight 9 changes pilot training around the world.

During a calm flight to Australia, all 4 engines

of a British Airways 747 suddenly stop working.

After a long terrifying descent,

the crew managed the restart the engines and land.

That's, that's amazing.

They spent an excited

and largely sleepless night in Jakarta before returning

to Halim Airport to inspect their plane.

We went back the next day to look at it in daylight.

The airplane had lost its sheen and in some places it

had been sandblasted quite well and all the decals

and the paint had come off.

It was very little to see until they stripped the engines down.

The engines were manufactured by Rolls Royce.

Their investigation was led by a former engineer,

Malcolm Grayburn.

Three of the engines were

removed in Jakarta following the incident and were ferried back

via cargo aircraft to London Heathrow and then transported

to South Wales where the engines were in fact stripped

down into piece parts and it was there that I got involved.

Grayburn was stunned by what he saw.

Much of the engine was badly scratched and scored.

We did do a forensic analysis of the engines

and we did record it all in terms of photographic

analysis and also we did lot of laboratory analysis.

Grayburn discovered the engines were

choked with fine dust, pieces of rock and sand.

When it was closely studied,

they learned that the debris was clearly volcanic ash.

Days after their harrowing flight, the passengers

and crew learn that the night they were flying there had

been a major eruption of the Mount Galunggung volcano located

just 1-hundred and 60 kilometers south east of Jakarta.

Tom Casadevall is director of the US Geological Survey

and has studied the Galunggung volcano.

Indonesia is the world's

most volcanically active country.

It has more than a hundred and thirty

historically active volcanoes, meaning volcanoes,

which have erupted in the last several thousand years.

Galunggung erupted explosively early in the 1980s.

In April, May, June of 1982 the eruptions became

increasingly more powerful.

The eruptions were large

and the damage was extensive.

More than 60-thousand people were

evacuated from the area around the mountain.

The night flight 9 flew nearby the volcano erupted again.

As the ash cloud rose more than 15-thousand meters

into the night, winds pushed it to the southwest,

right into the path of British Airways flight 9.

Never before had a volcanic cloud

seriously affected an airplane.

Could the ash really have crippled this flight?

Roger, declare emergency. Mayday, mayday, mayday.

Speedbird 9. We have lost all four engines.

Unlike ash that you might see in a chimney or after

a fire in a forest, this is not soft material at all.

This is very fine ground up particles

of solid rock and minerals.

This material is very, very abrasive.

It's very angular in shape.

If you were to see it under a microscope, you would see

very sharp angles and so that's what caused the abrasion.

In addition to sandblasting the windshield

and all the leading edges of the plane,

could the ash cloud explain all the other strange phenomena

the passengers and crew had experienced?

Remember the aircraft is moving at close

to 5-hundred miles per hour as it's flying into that cloud.

Even though it's a very fine material it can still cause

abrasion and friction on the skin of the aircraft.

Because it's such a dry environment up there,

that frictional electrification produces the glow that we

refer to as St Elmo's fire.

The electrification also caused the interference

in communication experienced by the crew.

Speedbird 9, you have lost number four engine?

Some of the volcanic ash that was sucked in

and ground up by the engines was also blown into the plane,

and when passengers and crew saw it

swirling through the cabin they feared the worst.

You're a passenger, you're looking out the window.

Suddenly you start breathing this sulfurous,

sulfur laden air in the cabin and it

probably is a choking, probably a shocking sensation.

It's essentially a house of horrors type situation.

While the volcanic ash caused the visible scarring,

filled the plane with smoke and fouled communications,

could it cause the engines to flame out as well?

A turbofan jet engine works

by sucking in enormous amounts of air.

The air is then highly pressurized

by the engine's compressor.

This tightly packed air is mixed with fuel and ignited.

The force of this reaction propels the jet through the sky.

The temperatures in the combustion chamber where

this ash is flowing through are around

2-thousand degrees centigrade and so volcanic ash

we know melts at about 13-hundred, 14-hundred degrees.

But when the liquid ash reached

deeper into the engine, it cooled slightly,

turning into a sticky molten goo.

It attached itself to the engine and began choking it.

We got a fundamental disturbance of the airflow

in the main core of the engine which caused

the engine to backfire and the engines flamed out

and that was the cause of the problem.

Backfires occur

when the engine isn't burning cleanly.

The engine's on fire!

There's too much fuel and not enough oxygen.

Engine failure, number four.

Fire action, number four.

On flight 9,

the backfires were the cause of the enormous jets of flame

many passengers saw behind the engines.

After struggling against the choking effects

of the ash cloud,

the engines onboard the 747 flamed out.

What Grayburn found next was that a remarkable

piece of chemistry saved the plane.

As soon as you came out of the volcanic ash

and the engines were not running remember

so everything cooled down, it was enough for this stuff

to break off and allow the engines to restart.

When enough of the molten ash was gone,

the engines were clear again and Townley-Freeman's frantic

efforts to restart them paid off.

Engine four back on line.

We have learned quite a bit

and we've incorporated this learning into pilot training.

Pilots now for example know what signs to look for

when they might be in an ash cloud

and those signs include the odor of sulfur in the cabin,

dust accumulating in the cabin and if you're at night you

might look out and see the frictional electrification

or the St Elmo's fire on the leading edges of the aircraft.

Another important lesson

learned from flight 9 is that volcanic ash clouds do not

appear on normal weather radar, which reflects water.

Since the clouds are dry,

they're all but invisible to radar.

That knowledge has led to better

communications between the geologists that study

volcanoes and the international airlines that fly over them.

The crew of flight 9 was showered with awards

and commendations in the months after their incredible night.

I thought the airmanship displayed

by this crew during this event was absolutely fantastic.

The way that they managed to guide this aircraft

back down to a safe landing after having

been through such extreme circumstances, it was fantastic

the way they recovered this aircraft, absolutely brilliant.

For everyone onboard flight 9,

the terrifying plunge through the skies had a lasting impact.

Betty Tootell was so struck by the events of that

night that she wrote a book about the ordeal.

This was an event which was unique in aviation

history and it seemed to me

absolutely vital that it should be put on record

and I wondered who was going to do this but no sooner had that

thought entered my mind than I thought I'm going to do that.

Tootell would also end up marrying a man

she met on the flight, James Ferguson.

Charles Capewell and his two sons made it

home two days after they touched down in Jakarta.

25 years later both Chas and Stephen still live in Perth.

Our time hadn't came and that was it.

From then on I took a different view of life.

When your time comes there's nothing you can do

but you can still hope and we hoped and we got out of it.

Not long after their fateful flight,

Captain Eric Moody created the Galunggung gliding club.

Every member of the crew and all passengers were

automatically admitted to this exclusive group.

The survivors of the British Airways flight 9

happily stay in touch to this day.