>Volcano erupts in Indonesia
>Locals don’t notice because they have shit weather radar
>747 flies through the dust cloud
>All 4 engines get filled with volcanic ash and burn out
>“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.”
>Spend 12 minutes gliding, dropping 23,500 feet in the process
>The pilots are preparing to be the first 747 ever to attempt a water landing
>Finally one of the engines restarts
>But ILS is offline
>Windscreen is completely opaque due to ash, no way to clean it
>Manage to land running entirely on instruments
>Fatalities: 0
>Injuries: 0
Survivors: 263
The level of stakes at some jobs are crazy.
Another example: if the powerpoint slides my team prepares for a board meeting are not pretty enough, my director might be sad.
I literally cannot tell the difference.
Source: am manager, and sometimes my underlings don’t toil hard enough in the PowerPoint mines.
One correction I feel is needed, the windscreen wasn’t dirty from ash, it had effectively been sand blasted opaque, with only a small corner of the screen remaining clear
To go further, pretty certain that jets have wipers. If it was just ash, they could have cleaned it to get some visibility.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_009 Awesome story here
Moody made an announcement to the passengers that has been described as “a masterpiece of understatement”
I didn’t believe that was an actual quote but here we are.
On the descent without visibility…
Moody described it as “a bit like negotiating one’s way up a badger’s arse.”
Oh my word. HAHAHA!
If I had a nickel for every time a 747 lost engines going through volcanic ash and recovered with no fatalities, I would have two nickels.
which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
You missed the chaddiest part.
Got two of four engines running. Climbs to set up for landing, one engine starts surging and flaming.
After losing all engines, nearly ditching at sea with no engines, the elation of getting something back and not knowing what will happen with the other one, with 250 lives on the line they shut it down because they know they should.
Good thing a 747 can carry balls of that size on one engine
And that’s how pilots learned to never fly around an erupting volcano and several years back all air traffic in Europe was halted when a volcano with an unpronounceable name in Iceland had a bad moment.
Hey, it is easy to spell how Icelanders pronounce it in my native language:
Or a cognate, Eyfallicle; ey as in island, fall as in a valley(?), icle from icicle.
Mér líkar þetta málið!
Islandmountainglacier. Got it. Why didn’t they say that in the first place?
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it is not ai generated, that photo is from 2014. it is highly edited by the original photographer
Read “The Checklist Manifesto” and you understand why pilots follow their protocols. Outcomes like this are because they did everything exactly according to the checklist.
Checklists are great and they work.
I’d be so pissed if I was on that plane
Your alternative would be being dead. I’d say they did pretty darn well. Any landing you can walk away from was a good landing after all.
