The Unflappable Flying Englishmen

I was winging my way home after yet another SHOT Show. My back hurt, my feet ached, and there was warmth in my heart from all the old friendships rekindled. However, that also meant I was trapped on a commercial airliner.

I intended on flying myself to the show in my little fighter plane, which my wife calls “Tommyrot.” I had to look that up. Tommyrot means foolish, silly or ill-advised.

The route was to take me across the Painted Desert and the Grand Canyon. It would have been epic. However, the weather sucked, which is why I found myself packed elbow to navel in a cramped metal tube with enough humanity to populate a small town. Sigh …

I hate flying commercial. As a pilot myself, flying as a passenger is a bit like a politician watching somebody else spend money. It’s just not natural. It did, however, provide the impetus for the AI in my Quora feed to start helpfully sending me narratives about airplane crashes. Here was my favorite …

'Twas a Dark and Stormy Night…

The year was 1982, and Captain Eric Moody was winging his way across the South Pacific between Malaysia and Perth, Australia, in British Airways 009. The plane’s callsign was Speedbird 9. The four-engine 747 carried 248 passengers and 14 crew. Now, several hours into the trip, all seemed well.

The first inkling the passengers had that something was amiss was when smoke began gradually filling the cabin. A glance outside showed that the engines and leading edges of the wings were engulfed in an otherworldly blue light. At the same time, the air inside the airplane grew steadily warmer. Then flames began shooting out of the back of the engines, and there resulted a most gut-wrenching drop. At that point, Captain Moody made the following announcement. I’m not making this announcement up …

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.”

In commercial aviation, as in medicine, there is such a thing as an excess of honesty. This was a prime example.

Roger Greaves and Barry Townley-Freeman rounded out the flight crew in the cockpit. They were collectively stumped. Showers of blue sparks engulfed the nose of the plane and wrapped around the cockpit glass. The engines were making a nasty grinding noise. They checked the onboard weather radar. Everything seemed clear. There were no storms or other impediments noted at all. The three experienced aviators were at a loss. And then absolutely everything went wrong.

It Gets Worse

The flight crew attempted a Mayday call, but the radios did not work properly, and the airspeed indicators rendered overtly spurious readings. Capt. Moody disengaged the autopilot and began manually flying the airplane, which was now an extremely heavy glider. The crew quickly consulted their charts and made haste for Jakarta.

Those big planes will actually glide astronomical distances, particularly from typical cruise altitudes. However, there were mountains between Speedbird 9 and the Jakarta runway. It was obvious they would never make it. The British Airways aircrew then began planning for a decidedly suboptimal eventuality — a controlled ditching in the open ocean.

A Dirty Little Secret

Allow me to let you in on a little aviation secret. Those inflatable survival slides that supposedly double as life rafts? That’s not real. Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger successfully ditched his Airbus 320 in the Hudson River back in 2009, but that was a freak exception. Most jet airplanes that hit the water at jet airplane speeds just disintegrate. Ditching in the ocean is nobody’s first choice.

Capt. Moody finally reached the air traffic controllers in Jakarta only to discover that his plane no longer appeared on radar. This evening just kept getting weirder and weirder. That’s when the cabin pressure began to drop precipitously.

The three crewmembers retrieved their oxygen masks, but the First Officer’s example was inoperative. Desperate to keep his friend from suffocating, Moody dove the plane toward the ocean, sacrificing precious altitude for breathable air. For the passengers in the back, this is about as bad as it gets.

At this point, clearing those mountains in a dead airplane was just never going to happen. However, as they reached a lower altitude, the flight crew was relieved to see the weird blue lights outside the cockpit begin to abate. Then, they noticed a familiar roar to the engines. The turbines were now spinning in the slipstream. The flight crew kept cycling through the emergency restart procedures for each engine sequentially. One big turbofan finally coughed to life, followed by another. Eventually, they had all four engines back online. That seemed a good time for another announcement.

Capt. Moody calmly said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We seem to have overcome that problem and have managed to start all the engines.”

Moody gradually began to power the big plane back up into the sky. However, as he climbed, the otherworldly blue light returned, and one of the four engines died. He immediately pushed the yoke forward and dove back toward the deck.

In all of the furor of trying to revive the dying plane, the flight crew had not been looking outside. Now that the aircraft was flying again, they realized that the windscreen was now frosted and opaque. With the exception of one tiny sliver on Moody’s side, the pilots could no longer see outside the cockpit. Like, at all.

Moody and company had just saved a jumbo jet from a complete engine failure in flight. They weren’t going to let an inability to see the runway slow them down. Moody’s copilot called out altitude, airspeed, and heading as he peered through the tiny streak of unspoiled cockpit glass. Miraculously, he managed a perfect touchdown right on the centerline. Paraphrased somewhat for a family-friendly audience, he later described sticking the landing as “A bit like negotiating one’s way up a badger’s butt.”

Clarity

The airplane was trashed, but miraculously, no one was hurt. Once on the ground, the details of their ordeal became clear. A volcano on the Pacific island of Java had exploded, filling the sky with volcanic ash. This ash is basically trillions of tiny, jagged rock particles. The ash was dry. The weather radar, which is calibrated to detect moisture, found it invisible.

This nasty abrasive stuff choked out the engines as well as the airplane’s cabin filtration system. The blue light was the result of the high-speed interaction between the grinding ash and the leading edges of the airplane — a variation on St. Elmo’s Fire. Once they reached lower altitudes and the engines cooled, the ash flaked off, allowing them to restart. The windscreen was irretrievably ruined.

I love flying. After a lifetime of doing it, I have enjoyed the occasional bit of airborne excitement myself. However, I am in awe of the raw unfiltered airmanship of Capt. Eric Moody and his crew. Those guys were the stuff of legend.

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