All Engines Out (With Captain Eric Moody) | British Airways Flight 9

this is the story of speed bird 9 or british airways flight 9. on the 24th of june 1982 it was a pitch black knight and a british airways 747 streaked above the indonesian islands it was on its way from kuala lumpur to perth australia perth was just a stopover its ultimate destination was auckland in new zealand this leg of the flight was captained by captain eric moody his team consisted of first officer roger greaves and flight engineer barry townley freeman the 747 had 248 passengers and 15 crew members on board all looked good the weather was calm all systems were in the green and everyone looked forward to landing in perth some five hours later as they cruised at 37 000 feet tiny pinpricks of light started popping up on the windscreen this was accompanied by acrid smoke coming in from the vents captain moody was brought back to the flight deck in front of them was the most intense display of saint elmo's fire that any of them had ever seen saint elmo's fires a natural phenomenon where a little bit of plasma formed due to ionization of air molecules roger the first officer looked over and saw that engine number four was lit from within at 8 42 pm jakarta time or 1 42 pm utc flight engineer barry freeman called out engine failure number four engine number four had flame down captain moody called for the engine fire drill and the other two pilots carried it out about a minute later engine number two surged and failed the flight engineer said engine failure number two which was quickly followed up by threescon which was followed up by they've all gone it took a second for the situation to sink in the flight engineer said four engines do not fail a quadruple engine failure was almost unheard of they were out of thrust but the instruments still work but the instruments painted a dire picture some of the instruments were inoperative and some others were literally off the charts and amber light told them that the engines had exceeded their maximum turbine gas temperatures eric said to his first officer okay roger put out a mayday at 8 44 pm first officer roger transmitted jakarta jakarta mayday mayday speedbird nine we've lost all four engines we're leaving 370 but even a simple mayday call proved to be harder than usual jakarta control misunderstood the mayday call they were under the impression that engine number four had failed a nearby garuda indonesia plane relayed the message to jakarta control only then did they understand the severity of the situation with no thrust they were falling and they needed to land somewhere but in their path lay the mountains on the island of java they needed to have at least 11 500 feet of altitude to cross the mountain range safely so the crew decided that if they were not able to maintain 12 000 feet by the time they got to the mountain range then they'd turn around and ditch the plane in the indian ocean with a plan in place they began their engine restart attempts were they in the ideal situation for an engine restart no but the engines had to start they just had to at 26 000 feet the cabin pressure warning horn sounded and the crew donned their oxygen masks but not first officer roger his mask had fallen apart in his hand captain moody now had a very tough decision to make he could either let the plane descend very slowly and risk exposing his first officer to a lack of oxygen his other option was to descend and take the plane down to a more breathable altitude but that would eat into the precious little altitude that they had they kept trying to restart the engines but no luck so far it was not because the fuel was not igniting the fuel ignited in a spectacular way there were tons of flames about 20 feet long behind the engines at 20 000 feet eric retracted the spoilers to slow their descent soon afterwards in the middle of all of this chaos captain moody made the following announcement to the passengers of flight 9. 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 at around this point captain moody began to contemplate the consequences of a dead stick landing in the ocean as a child his father had taken him out to watch flying boats and he knew that they did not fly at night the flying boats had a hard time judging their height above the waves his thoughts were interrupted by the sounds of cheer from the other two pilots engine number four was ramping up it was back online just as they had flamed out one by one the engines came back online at 8 57 pm they transmitted speedbird 9 were back in business all for running the crew requested for a higher altitude of 15 000 feet so that there was some clearance between them and the mountains but as they climbed they started to see some buildup of saint elmo's fire engine number two gave them some trouble it was vibrating so bad that it felt like it would shake the aircraft apart so engine number two was shut down captain moody realized that the saint elmo's fire was probably related to the engines flaming out and if that were the case then he knew that the engines would be pretty beat up slowly they made their way to jakarta's airport as they lined up they realized that their front windows were more or less opaque very carefully while flying blind they brought the plane down the opaque windows filled up with diffused light signifying that they were right above the runway and then captain moody set the plane down smoothly on the runway they had faced the impossible and they had done the impossible nobody thought that all four engines of a 747 would fail but it did and they did a marvelous job of bringing it back down so what was it that caused the engines to flame out in the first place what caused the eerie light show what caused the engines to start back up as they waited for the steps to be brought towards the aircraft flight engineer barry got an inkling as to what might have happened their clothes were covered with this fine black powder when they stepped outside they found that the paint from the leading edges of the plane had been stripped away the answer was clear they had flown through volcanic ash as they flew over indonesia mount galangang began erupting they had flown to the volcanic ash of this volcano the ash cloud started to show up on satellite photos after flight 09 had landed the engines were badly damaged the tips of the blades were ground away the silicate particles and the ash melted and adhered to the blades themselves changing the properties of the blades and disrupting the airflow in the engine that's all well and good but why did the engines restart when the engine stopped working the engines cooled meaning that the molten ash had solidified and broken off this allowed the engines to restart 19 days later a singapore airline 747 lost three of its engines in the same area and after that indonesian authorities permanently closed the airspace and rerouted all traffic to prevent this from happening in the future icao recommended that if another crew faced a situation like this they should reduce thrust to zero and descend to get away from that general area now usually this is the part where i thank you for watching this is the part where i think charles est and casey plainspotting for their amazing footage and this is the part where i tell you to stay safe but not today i was able to get in touch with captain eric moody and he was gracious enough to spend some time talking to me about flight zero nine please take a look i'm just like so you know a little bit star struck right now because i i heard about your incident when i was like 10 years old or something and i just remember being mesmerized by it i i remember telling my cousin i was like you know hey did you watch that mini air crash investigation video last night and he was like you know can you just like imagine how happy they were when the engine started back up and i never thought i'd be talking to you today oh well don't be too mesmerized okay so let's get to the first um question can you talk a bit about the incident itself i mean one moment you're just like flying along near indonesia and the next you know and the next moment you're being sandblasted can you take us through your thought process for a bit well it wasn't quite like that aaron we we didn't know what was happening i mean i wasn't on the flight deck when it all started the san elmo's fire first appeared i'd gone to the toilet and i was downstairs in fact because the upstairs one was full and the stuart s who was upstairs had gone on the flight deck to see if they wanted anything and she came back up and came halfway down the stairs and i was talking to the stewardess of the front uh person at the front she just wanted to told me that i was wanting back on the flight and all the other two wanted me to see were the wonderful sights that were going on because this elmo's fire was the best okay colorful elmo's we've ever seen any of us and i've seen dozens of times so really it was um we were just flying along we were into the dust we had no idea what it was we had no idea that we'd flown into anything yeah so then when i went back to the five on three the other two said come and have a look at this and as i was sitting down and you've got to imagine i was doing three or four or five things at the same time sitting down strapping in looking on the radar to see because as far as i was concerned said elmo's always only appeared when you were in fog missed high cirrus cloud you had to you needed some light moisture in the air okay and so i was looking to see because we were down over java over the tropics i wanted to see where these clouds were that we were going into and there weren't any oh okay so basically the you know your weather radar was clear and you had no idea what you were flying into no no idea at all wow um in the in the document that you sent me it said that the engines looked like as if they'd been lit from inside so can you just like describe what it looked like to look at it from the flight deck that's as it developed it started off initially like a good dose of some elmo's fire and it just developed and it got more and more and more intense the colors became more varied and more intense i'd never seen such colorful smiles before and it got more and more intense and it was only that we got i know this took seconds okay and as it did develop my first officer was looked back and he saw that these engines were lit up from inside so it was as bright as a magnesium flare was very very bright oh okay so yeah that's that's super interesting i'm just like imagining what that looked like in my head and you know you guys practiced a quadruple engine failure on a simulator a few months before the incident how accurate was the simulator compared to the real deal not a lot not a lot at all in fact very dissimilar in lots of ways because on the simulator the first thing that would happen when the engine stopped was the power would fail because you weren't generating any more and when that happened immediately the autopilot would drop out okay and when the autopilot drops out there's a hell of a clacks and goes off i mean it's a really loud ah you can't hear yourself talk so you've got to stop the noise then you can't miss that the autopilot's come out okay that didn't happen that didn't happen on the evening and when we were descending there were there were less everything was less or more than we've been told to expect okay so yeah and and i feel like you guys had to glide for quite a bit we clear we glided the airplane for about 15-16 minutes no engines going socially oh okay and i think you guys had the record up until the gimlee glider broke your record i feel like you guys glided the plane the most no no i think we were longer than them oh okay i don't know okay okay i'll have to check up on that later on it wasn't like a record that i'd want to break i'm interested in really yeah i don't i don't think any pilot would want to break that record certainly not on a dark phone night like we had i mean it was pitch black outside oh okay so yeah so it must have been like really hard for you to like orient yourself like you know keep the plane stable and not to like turn too sharply or anything like that well no it didn't really it handled so well it wasn't true it was a real pleasure to fly still then okay and uh what i was trying to think was think through this and my flight engineer uh described it best of all i think afterwards he said that was like thinking through treacle now he meant golden syrup or something like you know a sticky a sticky substance we were thinking through and it was quite honestly uh quite confusing okay okay i get it okay like even with the engines back up and running you could not like see that well out of the cockpit and uh if i remember correctly the vertical guidance of the ils was inoperative and you had to use the dme to bring the plane back in can you like talk a little bit more about that you know how you guys use the dme to like you know step it down to the runway well quite honestly i think that was the most skillful bit of the whole lot the approach the three of us combined really well we've been a good crew up until then but on that approach we had to uh each do our own thing but combine and it was it was very very very rewarding but coming down my co-pilot pulled out the heights and distances and i was having to sit on the edge of my seat to look down a two inch strip or an inch and a half strip of the side of the windscreen to see if i could see anything with the rubber okay and a three degree glide slope is you descend 300 feet every mile so every mile we went we had to be 300 feet lower and that was the way we judged it um do you think having three people in the cockpit that day contributed to the safe landing of speed bird nine would you have been able to do what you did had there just been two pilots well i'll tell you what i've tried my damnedest but there is no doubt the third person is was very very useful and i regretted the demise of the flight engineer i liked flying with flight engineers because they were very handy especially when you have problems but they were on that night yes it would have been harder i've flown i flew the 400 series for a long time well for six years at the end of my career and i've often looked at that and thought that's going to be very difficult because with all the messages tumbling down the screen like they do on the on the 400 or the airbus uh it's very hard for the human mind to keep up with what they're being told with the computer because it's done at computer speed and you can't you can't think of that speed at all well i can't and i don't you know many humans can and uh it was it was so much better having the three of us and having the old-fashioned suck squeeze bang glow instruments and uh and uh yeah yeah because uh what she said right there just it just like brought something back into my head because there was an airbus a380 that had like an engine failure of sort i think and it was like a two person crew and they were like being bombarded with like error message after error message and the co-pilot did mention that you know he had to like react to all of these messages in exactly the right way and if he messed up at least like one of them it would have been disastrous so you know that was like a pain point for him yeah i mean you must remember we started at 37 000 feet and finished at 12. it was a long time and we weren't nothing was much in a rush except we wanted to get the engines going and the most confusing thing of all was we didn't know what was happening we didn't know why they stopped and then when they started we didn't know why they started except that we were trying to get them but you don't have the postmortem in the air you have to post more brand yeah it's just it's just a wonderful story and with the 747 being like rather unceremoniously retired right now like i think british airways just got rid of their 747s can you like think of another instance where the 747 really came through for you uh no i know i did a few years on them i did five six years as a first officer and then uh nearly i can't do sums quickly uh 15 16 years as a captain i just thought it was a it was a beautiful airplane i mean originally the because i wasn't one of the first first officers that ba or boac had and the engines on them were pratt and whitney jt 9 d-3s i think they were and they were rubbish okay so they were absolutely right and you know we had a mystery tour where you went on a trip because you never knew where you were going to be how far you were going to go before one of the engines failed it was just like that wow you know everything i've heard about like the early 747s it's it's like it's said and you know um ingested with um you know a little bit of nostalgia and everyone looks back on it really fondly i loved it the whole time i was on it it was a wonderful airplane and a wonderful airplane yeah that's you know it's really impressive it's it's just sad that you know they're just taking it out of service and it makes an amazing sound when it takes off at least yeah it does you're dead right but in a way our son is a first officer on the he was on the a380s now on the a350 and when he tells me the fuel burn on those airplanes it's no wonder that they're being retired there was so much more because nowadays yeah so would you like to add anything more to this like you know any final thoughts not really yeah aaron i i think it's been an incident that's been in the public now for well nearly 30 some odd years isn't it or over 30 years uh then i think there's not much more yeah i can say yeah i'll answer questions but i can't uh i can't say yeah you you've probably like answered every single question i've asked at least at least like 10 times or at least i mean i'm just amazed that the interest has gone on for so long i thought by christmas 1982 the story would be dead no here we are you know 18 28 years later it's a really interesting story and that's why it's loved on it's it's mesmerizing it is it's like really awe inspiring that's the word i'm looking for and that's why it's lived on person yeah i just please it worked out well because i wanted to live oh god it is um it's like was it hard for you getting back into the cockpit after that no no once we knew or once i knew what had happened and that we hadn't done anything to cause the uh the engines to stop but we weren't like hell and gold i didn't my first officer and my engineer the engineer worked hardest of all to get the engines going and i just concentrated on keeping the airplane in one piece in one well flying wow it is just you know captain you are like one of the most amazing pilots like you know you'd probably be in like the top one percent of like all pilots right now yeah it is just it has just been an honor talking to you i thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to talk thank you for being so lucky it is it has been do keep in touch if i'm ever in the area i'll just i'll buy you a beer or something yeah i'm not got much longer to live i don't think you know i'm i'm pushing 80 now so well you know you never know if i'll look you up if i'm ever in the area i will look you up okay thanks very much aaron best of luck to you thank you you as well thank you so much bye bye you

Channel: Mini Air Crash Investigation

Views: 271,625

Rating: 4.9215956 out of 5

Keywords: mini air crash investigation, british airways, british airways 747, british airways 747 retirement, speedbird, speedbird 9, airmanship at its finest, 747 emergency landing, british airways 747 landing, air crash investigation, all engines out, aviation movie, aviation footage, aviation documentary, aviation safety, mayday, landing at jakarta, jakarta emergency landing, plane safety, 747 early retirement, 747, boeing 747, 747-200, british airways 747-200, british airways landing

Id: m_Vz6v9tsgk

Length: 22min 1sec (1321 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TheMightyArsenal]

Probably my favourite episode of ACI to watch this one

[u/SedatedApe61]

The report on what happened was great! I've seen this incident broadcasted on a few different TV shows.

But the absolute best part was the interview! How lucky you were to be able to get to speak with the captain and he does seem to be a humble and delightful man! And he spoke and his behavior was the same with you as it was when interviewed for those TV shows. What a lovely man, and at the right place at the right time 🛫

Best get over there and buy him that beer (or beverage of his choice) soon! Then buy him a second for all of us here!!! 🍺🍺 or ☕☕

[u/lollystar888]

Gosh, I love this episode. I'm fascinated by this incident, it's super cool you were able to get in touch with the pilot!

[u/Titan828]

My dad told me that when he went to Australia in the early 80s he met someone who was on-board that flight: a scary experience.

I know a man from my time in Air Cadets who flew the 747 for British Airways, and he told me that the Captain, Eric Moody was his training Captain, he flew with the co-pilot several times, the Flight Engineer he didn’t know.