Falling from the Sky: Air Disasters FULL EPISODE | Smithsonian Channel

high above the Indian Ocean disaster occurs more than six miles in the air all four engines of a British Airways 747 stop working Roger declares emergency May day May day Mayday Steve engines and propels British Airways Flight 9 Falls towards the ocean who is fighting to save his plane from crashing into the sea which has paralyzed his message but threatens the lives of all on board ladies and gentlemen we are beginning our approach we lost both engines June 24, 1982 British Airways Flight 9 crosses the sky over Indonesia in a few hours the plane and The 263 people on board are scheduled to land in Perth, Australia.

Phyllis Welsh and her daughter are sitting on Kevin e in the back of the huge plane. How is that heroine? If you're anything like your family, you're having a tough time at Mansfield Park. spend a few hours I wouldn't mind being there, it's okay mom, we'll get there we had already crossed at least two time zones we were very tired we had flown through Bombay via Kuala Lumpur we hadn't been able to sleep much, if any, and it was a dark night, pitch black, Betty and Phyllis. Charles Capewell returns to his home in Perth, Australia, with his two sons, Chaz and Stephen Lids, well, it's time for a nap.

See again, oh what do you want? sleeping here, well, it was a good flight, it was going well, uh, getting out of London was great and we were all looking forward to getting home and the two boys were looking forward to getting back to Mum. I thought we'd be home in three hours. Perth. they will be batting we will have an attraction we will depart while many of the passengers have been traveling for almost a day the crew is fresh they took control of the last stop 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 trained on the 747.

Roger checks with Jakarta speed control bird 9 over haleem at level three seven zero first officer Roger Grieves has been co-pilot for over six years Barry Townley Freeman has been a flight engineer on these planes for a little longer. He hadn't signed with Eric before uh or Barry and that was the first time we met on that flight. As the plane flies over the city of Jakarta, it is cruising at more than 36,000 feet and has been in the air for an hour and a half. Captain Moody checks his weather radar and it shows smooth sailing for the next 300 miles.

All right, Roger, it's all clear. just keep your eyes open I'll be back in a moment I just have to use a foreign loop many of the passengers had fallen asleep while Charles Capewell and his children snooze and the ominous Haze appears overhead is it still legal to smoke on passenger planes in 1982 for the cabin crew, although the smoke seems thicker than normal, there seems to be a lot of smoke outside, they start to worry that a small fire may be burning somewhere on the plane, maybe someone has it in the bathroom, go to see if we can find something a fire at 36,000 feet is a terrifying prospect if there's a fire somewhere the crew must find it immediately in the cockpit the flight takes an unsettling turn right now we're sitting there dealing with the tone of the dark knight shot , of course, and then we start to get these points of light on the windshield The Saint Helmu fire I don't believe it, it doesn't move like it should The Saint Elmo fire is a natural phenomenon that is sometimes seen when planes fly through of heavy storm clouds, but there are not supposed to be Tonight there will be storm clouds.

Anything on the radar. No, that was clear. I don't like how this looks. Let's take a better look with the help of its landing lights. The two men are disturbed to see a thin layer of clouds surrounding their feet. plane even though nothing is showing up on its radar, but at 37,000 feet the normal thing you would anticipate would be a high cirrus, which is just a thin layer of clouds, we better get the captain back here. I was reading in my book and there was a slight movement of turbulence, just a slight movement, and I looked to the left where I had a clear view of the port wing and to my surprise it was covered in a bright, gleaming white light that looked like cling to the wing of the plane.

I continued reading but found that I kept reading the same paragraph over and over again and didn't understand a word. I just didn't know what was happening in the cabin, the smoke begins to thicken, the waiters have not been able to understand. Where does it come from, if there is a fire, they can't find it, eh, very good, because the passengers are comfortable. The foreigner seems quite smoky here. I noticed thick smoke coming into the cabin through the vents above the windows and that was a very sobering sight of Turkish cigarettes, it smelled like a sort of sulfuric electric odor and I entered the flight deck expecting to hear that we had some electrical smoke somewhere on the plane, but nothing was further from the truth.

Good start or right after you came out. on the radar no, it's clear, it's not a cloud, oh my god, look at engine 4. it's illuminated somehow Captain Captain, take a look at number one, same thing on my side, none of the crew I've seen something like this before, but the light show is just At first, their strange flight is about to take a terrifying turn for the worse. This light show, if you wish, becomes more intense. In fact, we ended up sitting there with two sheets of bright white light in front of us instead of the interior windshield. the smoke in the cabin has become denser Stuart Graham Skinner has been organizing an intense but silent search for the fire.

What's with all the smoke? There was smoke in the cabin. It got very, very hot. the back of your throat up to your nose into your eyes and you're rubbing this and your eyes were watering and it was oh, it's not a very pleasant situation at all flight engineer Barry Tunley Freeman has been checking his instruments care

full

y he smelled the smoke but so far there is no indication that there is a fire in any of the plane's systems I can't find anything with a mystery facing them suddenly they are faced with a new terrifying situation the whole wing was a shadow of light and I thought well he said: oh you better close that because sir we don't know what that is applause then I realized 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 pure flame coming out of the back of all the engines.

Is it going to penetrate from the outside of the plane? Are you going to enter the cabin? Are we going to burn to death? Are we going to choke to death in the smoke? happens what's causing it what are they going to do about it as the fire engulfs the engines one of them revs loudly and shuts down engine failure number four fire action number four checklist power and gear assembly cross lever closed starter lever off once an engine fails call the drill to close that one, you have drills for certain things so you don't have, don't fly together as a crew forever, you can fly with different people and then you can standardize operations that the instruments don't indicate.

There was a fire on the plane, but passengers can see flames coming from the engines and spreading throughout the 747. He couldn't see the engines from where he was sitting. He could only see the space behind them, but there was enough brightness in that. room to convince me that the plane was really on fire, we were in trouble, they knew that as long as they were they knew we were in big trouble, and they looked at me long enough to say well, what are we doing now? Dad, the 747 is more than six miles over the ocean, its engines seem to be on fire and the peculiar smoke continues to fill the cabin and then the unthinkable happens, engines number two, God, okay, then start shutting down the engine, no. , wait, we'll go, oh. four motors failed, the other three just shut down almost immediately and that's when it starts to be a serious emergency those motors made a grinding noise almost like a cement mixer and then gradually the noise just disappeared and they stayed on. silence for a minute and a half we've gone from four engines running normally to none m47 has plenty of fuel, but somehow all four jet engines have stopped working completely Roger declares emergency mayday mayday mayday speed bird nine we've lost the four engines of three seven zero mayday mayday mayday speed bird nine we have lost the four engines of three with no engine power and no idea what has paralyzed their plane British Airways Flight 9 begins to fall from the sky Jakarta control speed bird 9 now we have lost all of three six zero first officer Roger Grieves broadcasts one day in May but has problems transmitting his message do you have a problem?

Jakarta controls speed bird nine we have lost all four engines repeat four engines now descending through flight level three five zero speedboat nine you have lost engine number four this idiot does not understand Jakarta controls speed bird nine we have lost all four engines I repeat the four engines now descending through flight level three five zero air traffic control in Jakarta unfortunately seemed to have a little trouble understanding what we were actually saying four engines only when another plane nearby transmits the MayDay car to the controllers in Jakarta, understanding through flight level three, five zero9 speedboats, all four engines understood, standing, as far as the crew knows, no 747 had lost power in all of its engines before the crew had to find out why It's happening now.

I think we put something together, we were worried and worried that we did something wrong, you know, because the whole thing all three of us felt exactly the same and it was a personal fault in the sense of what did I miss what did I do wrong you know because you know this guy of things not happening right it is not designed to glide even without its engines a 747 can go nine miles for every half mile falls without power flight 9 has begun a long, slow fall about six miles over the ocean the crew has less than half hour before crashing into the sea when everyone stops you enter automatic mode obviously we had practiced this exercise in the simulator many, many times and that is very good and everything is very good as long as what happens on the plane really happens to you. reflects on what happens to you in the simulator and I'm afraid that was not the case in the simulator when the four engines start the autopilot goes off but high above the Indian Ocean Captain Moody sees that his autopilot is still on we were the three confused and worried that what was happening to us was not what we had been told would happen happened to us, okay, start restarting the drill.

In the heat of the situation, check that they don't have time to figure out why the autopilot is still on something, not again, then from the top battery, check the crossfeed valves, open the fire switch on the standard. restarting the drill takes up to three minutes to complete fuel pressure drops from the sky the crew has less than 10 chances to start their engines before time runs out let's go again gentlemen from above check the battery in the valves cross-feeders open fire shift to 32,000 feet Captain Eric Moody decides to turn the plane back toward the nearest airport, Halim, outside Jakarta, but even that is too far if he can't get at least some of the engines run again.

Jakarta speed bird 9 turn left back to haleem de three zero zero speedboot nine the radar can't see you squawk Alpha Air Traffic Control asks you to transmit the emergency transponder signal Jakarta speed bird nine we are already squawking seven seven zero zero now the crew is flying back to an airport that can't find them on radar without the constant roar of the engines, the cabin is silent some of the passengers feel the plane starting to descend but without communication from the cabin they can only guess that the courtesy was incredible because that was the plane. there's no engines, there's nothing on it, it seemed eerie you know, it's actually a bit surreal because it looks like it's suspended in spice or something, all you could feel was this tranquility and the moans of some people who were really annoying, some people are just sitting quite rigid, almost as if they didn't notice anything at first, it was pure fear and then after a while it turns into acceptance, you know you're going to die, we knew we were going to die.

Captain Moody can't. restart the engines unless you can keep the plane flying between 290 and 310 miles per hour but the airspeed indicators are not working Captain, I have 320 knots on my side, well I have 270. Damn, that's a 50 knot difference . It will change speed when

falling

from the sky without engine power. The 747 crew now has no idea how fast they are going, butTo have the best chance of restarting the engines, Captain Moody must get the plane flying at the correct speed. From that point on, Eric varied the speed in a range of about 100 knots, hoping that at some point or another coinciding with the time we put fuel in the engines, we would actually be at the right speed to change gears.

Captain Moody turns off the autopilot. He then slowly lifts the nose of the plane to slow it down and then pushes it down to increase its speed. The annoying movement of the roller coaster adds to the panic felt in the cabin. Pressure warning Captain for a ten thousand pressure warning, that's not what you're supposed to do. that and a warning horn sounded. This had never happened in the simulator in this exercise, so it was a surprise to us, in addition to providing electrical power, a jumbo jet's engines help keep the cabin pressurized with the The engine does not work, of course, the air It was not being pumped so gradually that the pressure was being released with all four engines off the pressurized air is leaking rapidly the decreasing level of oxygen is causing the passengers to have foreign gases for their oxygen masks, but First Officer Greaves cannot getting his mask to work, that was a problem he could have solved without it.

It was stowed above my head and when I lowered the mass of oxygen through the mask and the tube separated, the captain must make a difficult decision if he continues to descend slowly, it will be increasingly difficult for First Officer Greaves to breathe, he said look if we can get up to 20,000 feet, um quickly we can all take off our oxygen mask and we can talk and we're back to crew again, we had to increase the descent rate to get down to a lower altitude faster, which under the circumstances was something we really didn't we would have chosen to do it so I submerged the plane and got rid of about six thousand feet in a minute loss of cabin pressure and Steep tint have another terrifying consequence things go out, like they hang in front of you and I looked to see Stephen , a god, and I pulled Paulie out of the plug, so I made sure Chad had his oxygen.

I've seen some movies on airplanes and you know, once that happens you know you're in serious trouble here we go Bridge normally mom the oxygen masks fell off the cabin crew try to use the public address system to explain what's happening but no it works Boss Stuart Graham Skinner settles for a low-tech backup, can you hear me? We're having a little problem with the public address system, so if you were to put your masks over your mouth and nose and breathe normally, Foreign First Officer Roger Greens manages to fix his broken oxygen mask, as he's still frustrated for engines that do not start well.

Barry, let's start the restart drill Ready, set up the battery check, come on, no, okay, so let's do it from the upper batteries, check the first officer. Grieves, a buried engineer. Tomley Freeman has, in fact, shortened the standard restart drill, which is giving them more opportunities to get the engines running but so far nothing is working. The process we went through all the time was continuous. We hadn't had any success with the drill despite all the efforts we were making, but it was the only thing we had. It was left to hold on to, so that's what we did from above again.

Check the battery. I have no idea. I don't think any of us know how many times we tried to restart those engines. If I say 20, you would think that is too low. I say 50, I think that's probably right as the plane falls further and further. Captain Moody faces a brutal choice. A mountain range crosses Jabba's island between his plane and the airport. He knows that he has to be at least 11,000 feet tall. to erase him, but if his engines don't restart soon, they won't make it at this rate, he will crash in a matter of minutes.

It's just a matter of where Captain Moody decides. If the engines are not restarted soon, he will spin. He turns back toward the ocean and tries to land in the water. Alright? Are we achieving something? much for us here never done before hiding his concern Captain Moody addresses the passengers and crew, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, we have a little problem, all four engines have stopped, we are doing everything everything possible to enter. under control I trust you're not in too much distress, yes, most passengers expect the worst, mom in trouble, the plane is going Dan will do what's best for the kids, we love you, I'm sorry, oh, I thought we were going down heading to the ocean, which crashed and me.

I thought if she got the note, you know, she knew we were still thinking about it and we did everything we could: would they burn us alive or suffocate us? Well the plane broke up in the air and went unharmed into space which was my biggest fear or we will fall into the sea and be eaten by live sharks oh we will crash into a mountain let's crash into a mountain quickly and end all of this well , nothing has not started, the captain must decide to continue flying and probably crash us. to the mountains or turn around and jump into the sea.

I do not know how to swim. She didn't know how to swim anyway, so I thought, well, you know I'm doomed anyway and I'm just hoping that maybe one of the passengers can help them both. boys to make sure they could stay afloat, we had very little chance of starting the engines before having to look again because we would not have been able to get over the mountains on the south coast of Java. Sky Level Cut Out No fuel pressure now available, ignition on standby on and then as suddenly as it stopped running the fourth engine roars back to life.

Engine 4 comes back online and all of a sudden there was kind of like someone hit the other Panda hit from below and then me. I realized there might be a thing that the Rolls-Royce engine makes when it starts, it's a thud, you know, and it was, uh, it was good, it was wonderful to hear. The 747 can fly with one engine, but Captain Moody knows only one. the engine still doesn't give it enough power to clear the mountains the glass is now half

full

it's not half empty now we have a real chance and I'll tell you what the three of us would have dragged that plane across the entire island of Java as the plane falls to over 13,000 feet, another engine sputters to life, engine three comes back online, quickly followed by the last two, do you believe it, engines one and two come back online due to a almost certain disaster, the crippled plane is Now, at full power, I returned my son, not to Perth, but to an airport.

All we wanted was to land on Earth and, you know, be part of the living again, that's why we were there, we were dead. Jakarta, the nine bird. are back in service all four running all four running this time local controllers have no problem understanding the message all four engines are in service again confirm continue with Haley affirmative affirmative we say okay, let's get this on the ground as quickly as we can ladies and Gentlemen, this is what your captain speaks. It seems that we have overcome that problem and have managed to start all the engines.

We are diverting them to Jakarta and expect to land in about 15 minutes. Captain Moody begins to climb, putting a lot of space between his plane and the mountains below, but as he advances. The strange lights that he saw when the crisis started reappear in front of the plane as soon as we reach thousands of feet, this is almost a fire starting again, although I am not slow, so I said, let's get out of here quickly, but before . can go down very far the plane is hit again two are going up the whole plane was shaking it was just going Bang Bang Bang the atmosphere in the cabin was very tense and very calm by then I think very few people were talking I think there are quite a lot of prayers going up the engines failed violently, the captain must make another decision to start shutting down the drill checklist, shutting off the gear, thrust lever closed and we were reluctant to do it, as you probably understand, but you know that was it, so we went back to work. three engines The airport's first officer, Greaves, thinks the windshield is covered in moisture, making it difficult to see, and I said to Eric, yeah, it's a little foggy out there, so we turn on the fans, you know, like the vaporizers in your car.

To try and of course that didn't work, I used the windshield wipers and somehow it didn't work, the glass itself was badly damaged for some other reason. I looked over the edge of my windshield and about a two-inch strip down. The edge on the left side could see much more clearly, but couldn't see much from the front, it was becoming more and more opaque as we got closer to the lines, the crew gets one last unwanted surprise piece of equipment. the terrain that helps them descend at the proper angle does not work The DC path does not work.

The localizer that shows you the left and right center line of the runway was working, but the glide slope that gives you the actual profile for descent was not. working After all the trouble they have been through, now the crew has to land their plane manually. We then continued with Eric flying the localizer and me indicating the distance and altitude he should be at 300 feet, Captain, so that he could then adjust his descent rate to what I was telling him as far as the glider was concerned 150 feet. captain 100 50 feet 30 feet on runway back 90 knots 80 knots we're down it's very good for a cold soda and the plane just landed itself seemed to kiss the Earth anyway it was beautiful wow that's amazing with ground safety in Haleem airport in Jakarta Passengers celebrate the end of a terrible ordeal They also want to know what happened No fire was found, so why had smoke filled the cabin, how could all four engines have stopped almost at the same time time and what were the strange lights that surrounded the plane in the cabin?

The flight crew is relieved but also worried that they might be to blame for the first thing we did when parking the plane. and closing it all, um, was then going through all the paperwork to see if possibly there was something somewhere that could have given us some advance warning of some kind of phenomenon that caused what happened to us every time because it's going to be Coming back to us, the Damage to the 747 is extensive from the outside, the crew notices that its windshield has been deeply scratched, they see bare metal showing through where the paint has somehow been removed and they still have no idea why it happened All this.

We went back the next day to look at it in daylight, the plane had lost its shine and in places had been sandblasted quite well and all the decals and paint had come off, there was really very little to see until the engine was removed. Okay, the engines were made by Rolls-Royce. Its research is led by a former Rolls-Royce engineer, Malcolm Grayburn. We did a forensic analysis of the engines. We recorded everything in terms of photographic analysis and also did a lot of laboratory analysis. Rayburn discovers that the engines were clogged with fine pieces of rock dust and sand.

When they studied it closely, they discovered that the debris was clearly volcanic ash. Days after their harrowing flight, passengers and crew discovered that the night they were flying there had been a major eruption. of the mount galangong volcano located just 100 miles southeast of jakarta tom cassadivall is director of the us geological survey and has studied the galangong volcano indonesia is the most volcanically active country in the world. It has more than 130 historically active volcanoes, that is, volcanoes that have erupted in the last few thousand years. It erupted explosively in the early 1980s in April, May, June 1982.

The eruptions became increasingly powerful. The eruptions were large. and the damage to the terrain was extensive more than 60,000 people were evacuated from the area around the mountain Night Flight 9 flew nearby the volcano erupted again when the ash cloud rose more than 49,000 feet in the night the winds she was pushed southwest right into the path of British Airways Flight 9. seriously affected a plane. Could the ashes have paralyzed this flight? Roger declares an emergency? mayday mayday mayday speed bird nine we have lost all four engines unlike Ash which can be seen in a chimney or after a forest fire this is not a soft material at all it is very fine ground particles of solid rock and minerals this material en It is very, very abrasive, it has a very angular shape.

If you looked at it with a microscope you would see very sharp angles and that's what caused the abrasion, apart from sandblasting the windshield and all the leading edges of the plane, could the ash cloud explain everything? The other strange phenomena experienced by the passengers and thecrew remember that the plane is moving at about 500 miles per hour as it flies into that cloud, although it is a very thin material, it can still cause abrasion and friction on the skin of the plane because it is There is such a dry environment up there that electrification by friction it produces the glow we refer to as St.

Elmo's Fire. The electrification also caused interference in the communication experience by the crew of speedboat nine. He has lost engine number four. Part of the volcanic ash that was vacuumed. crushed by the engines it was also thrown towards the plane and when the passengers and crew saw it spinning in the cabin they feared the worst, if you are a passenger, you are looking out the window, suddenly you start breathing this air loaded with sulfur and sulfur in the cabin and it's probably a feeling of suffocation, probably a shocking feeling, it's essentially a house of horrors type situation, while the volcanic ash caused visible scars, filled the plane with smoke and fouled communications, it also caused the engines they will go out, as well as an x-ray.

From the front to the rear of the engine, a turbofan jet engine works by sucking in enormous amounts of air. The air is then highly pressurized by the engine's compressor. This compact air mixes with fuel and ignites. The force of this reaction propels the jet through the sky into the combustion chamber where this ash flows around 2000 degrees Celsius, so the volcanic ash we know melts at about 1300 1400 degrees to reach deeper into the engine, it is It cooled slightly, turning it into a sticky, molten substance that stuck to the engine. and we started choking it, we have a fundamental airflow disturbance in the main engine core, which caused the engine to shut down and the engines to shut down and that was the cause of the problem.

Firecrackers occur when the engine does not burn cleanly. it's too much fuel and not enough oxygen failure number four fire action number four checklist power and equipment configured on flight nine the counterproductive effects wereThe cause of the huge jets of flame that many passengers saw behind the engines after fighting The choking effects of the ash cloud, the engines aboard the 747 shut down, what Greyburn discovered next was that a remarkable piece of chemistry saved the plane as soon as it emerged from the volcanic ash and the engines were not running, he recalls. , so everything cooled down, it was enough for this to come off and allow the engines to restart when enough of the modern Mash was gone, the engines were clean again and the frantic sound of Tom Lee Freeman's efforts to restart them paid off .

Engine 4 came back online. We have learned quite a bit and have incorporated this learning into pilot training. Pilots now, for example, know what cues to look for when they might be in an ash cloud, and those cues include smell. of sulfur in the cabin, dust accumulates in the cabin and if you are at night you can look out and see friction electrification or the St. Elmo fire on the leading edges of the plane. The foreign lesson learned from Flight 9 is that volcanic ash clouds do not appear on normal water-reflecting weather radar. Since the clouds are dry, they are almost invisible to radar.

That knowledge has led to better communications among geologists studying the volcanoes and the international airlines that fly over them, the crew of Flight 9 were showered with awards and praise in the months following their incredible night. I thought the aerial skill displayed by this crew during this event was absolutely fantastic. The way they managed to guide this plane back to a safe landing after going through such extreme circumstances was fantastic. the way they recovered this absolutely brilliant plane for everyone on board flight 9 the terrifying fall through the skies had a lasting impact Betty Tuto was so shocked by the events of that night that she wrote a book about alien Charles's ordeal Capewell and his two children.

I arrived home two days after they landed in Jakarta. 25 years later, both Chaz and Steven still live in Perth. Our time had not come and that was it. From then on I took a different view of life. When the time comes, there is nothing you can do. do it, but you can still hope and we waited and got out of this shortly after the fateful flight. Captain Eric Moody created the galangun gliding club. All crew members 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