January 23, 20232 yr Popular Post What is the most British thing ever? I read about this British bloke recently. He was the Captain of British Airway’s Flight 009 in 1982. When things on board the aeroplane got a bit “dodgy,” Captain Eric Moody, made this very British announcement 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 I guess the American translation for this would be: Ladies and gentlemen. We are all going to die. Now is the time to panic. But there’s actaully a really interesting story behind this very understated British way to declare a catastrophe. The airplane in question, British Airways Flight 009, also called Speedbird 9, was on the way from Malaysia to Perth. It had been in the sky for a few hours at cruising altitude, when the 248 passengers and 14 crew members on board started to notice maybe the worst thing you never want to experience on an airplane. What’s the scariest thing that could happen six miles up in the air? Smoke. At first the passengers think it’s from a stray cigarette (this incident occured when smoking on flights was still allowed). But gradually it gets thicker. It’s hard to breathe and the passengers’ eyes are streaming. The temperature increases in the cabin. Looking out the window, passengers see the engines glowing with an eerie blue flame. Then flames start shooting out of the back. Meanwhile, in the front, Captain Moody and crewmates Roger Greaves and Barry Townley-Freeman are having some strange experiences of their own. Something they have never seen before — an otherwordly light show — is playing in front of the windshield. Moody checks the Doppler, but the radar is clear. No storms forecasted in the area. The enginges start to make a grating noise. The crew still has no idea what is going on. Then, one by one, they go silent. Modern passenger jets are built with multiple layers of redudencies. That way, if one critical system fails, there will be a back-up. This particular jet had four enginges. Even if three failed, the airplane could safely limp its way back to an airport on one engine alone. But, in the sudden, horrifying silence, Moody and crew realize they’ve lost not one, but all four engines, at once. The passenger jet and it’s 263 occupants has just become a high-tech paper airplane. And to make things worse, the weird, alien light show is still playing up in the night’s pitch blackness. That’s when Moody makes his iconic announcemen: Ladies and gentlemen. 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. Meanwhile, in the cockpit, everything seems to be going wrong. Moody tries to send out a Mayday signal to the nearest airport, but the message is garbled. The speed indicators no longer output the correct speed either. If you’ve throw a paper airplane or a styrofoam glider, you know that you don’t need engines to “fly.” When the engines shut off, the airplane doesn’t simply “fall” out of the sky. It loses altitude slowly. Flying without an enginge is called gliding, and pilots can go a good 50–100 kilometers before hitting the ground. It’s also possible (though difficult) to land without engines (remember the “Miracle on the Hudson where the airplane ditched by landing gracelessly in the Hudson River but all passengers escaped mostly unhurt?). That’s what Moody and team plan to do. Get the airplane on the ground, without engines. Moody switches off the autopilot and checks his map. The aircraft probably has enough altitude to make it back to the Jakarta airport, without having to ditch in the ocean. However, there are tall mountains in the way, and the crew will need extra altitutde to clear them. Moody charts a path for Jakarta, and starts flying the airplane, nosing up and down, to try and keep the speed in check despite the buggy speedometer. His crewmates start running through the engine restart procedures over and over, hoping to get some flicker of a working enging. Nothing. And the Jakarta air traffic controller informs the airplane that they don’t even appear on the radar. That’s when the air pressure drops. The pilots reach for their oxygen masks, but Greave’s mask connection is broken. He can’t get it fixed. Moody isn’t ready to pilot a possible water ditching on an airplane gone wrong, with no engines without his full team, so he noses down and swiftly descends to an altitude where Greaves can breathe normally without his mask. To the passengers in the dark, eerie, smoke-filled cabin in back, it feels like a roller coaster. Now, the airplane definitely doesn’t have the altitude to clear the mountains. As Moody starts preparing for an ocean ditching, he notices that the blue lights outside the windshield have gone away. Then, he hears an amazing noise. The roar of the engines. He made a good choice not letting Greaves go unconcious from hypoxia. His team had kept running the engine restart procedures over and over, and somehow, by some miracle, they flickered back to life. First one engine, then two, then three, finally all four enginges were back in service! Back in the cabin, the 260 passengers and crew members, strapped in, now wearing life vests and oxygen masks, also hear the low throttle of the engines. Then the intercome dings and Moody confirms for them that they are back online. Ladies and genetlemen This is your captain speaking, we seem to have overcome that problem and have managed to start all the engines. Moody throttles the airplane back into the sky, but as he gains altitude, the weird lights come back. He quickly drops altitude, but not before losing one of the four enginges. They still have enough power to make it to the airport though. That’s when the crew notices another issue. They were so distracted by the blue lights and by not dying in a fiery crash, they didn’t realize that the windshield had gone completely opaque. Except for a tiny sliver in the corner, they couldn’t see anything. No airport. No landing strip. No runway. With the crew calculating on the spot, and yelling out the correct altitude and speed for the descent, Moody uses their data, and the sliver to line up the airplane. It was a masterclass in communication and airmanship. Moody later, very Britishly, described the landing as: a bit like negotiating one's way up a badger’s arse. There’s a bump and the airplane kisses the runway. In the back, everyone is crying, laughing, and hugging random strangers. Everyone is alive. Back on Earth. There are no injuries. The crew later learns that a volcano on the island of Java had erupted. Volcanic ash is dry, so it is invisible to a Doppler radar taht just reflects moisture. The ash is also composed of billions and trillions of miniscule rock fragments with sharp edges. The dense ash had entered the airplane through the filtration system, filling the cabin with smoke and choking passsengers. The gunk in the ash had stuck to the engines, choking them up. Once the engines cooled, the ash flaked out and the engines restarted. The blue light was a phenomenon called St Elmo’s Fire basically caused by high friction of the ash particles striking the airplane at high speed. The ash particules had also scratched the windshield beyond repair. After this close call, where a quick-thinking crew and their amazing display of airmanship narrowly averted a tragedy, the pilots all recieved various awards and honors. The FAA started marking volanoes in danger of eruption. But that pilots announcement still stands out to me amid all the drama. 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. Communication… it saves lives… Editing to add this video where I took some of the screenshots from. It’s a dramatization alongside interviews of the incident
January 23, 20232 yr What are the chances that the pilot asked a stewardess to brew up a pot of tea while this was going on?
January 23, 20232 yr 23 minutes ago, Macanudo said: What are the chances that the pilot asked a stewardess to brew up a pot of tea while this was going on? "don't forget the coffee" as for stories like this flight, there is an entire genre of youtube videos that go into details of any flight problems that have occurred. There are people that break down incidents that almost happen on any random day. Edited January 23, 20232 yr by Nice Guy Eddie
January 23, 20232 yr Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes!
January 23, 20232 yr 1 hour ago, Nice Guy Eddie said: "don't forget the coffee" as for stories like this flight, there is an entire genre of youtube videos that go into details of any flight problems that have occurred. There are people that break down incidents that almost happen on any random day. Like dipping on a plane and wearing flip flops? Don't need youtube for that!
January 23, 20232 yr Thought this thread was going to involve Cheryl Ladd and Kris Kristofferson. Kind of disappointed.
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