>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
When I was a kid, there was a TV show on the Discovery Channel called “Mayday” where they would reenact famous plane accidents. The episode about this particular incident (Falling from the sky) was my absolute favorite.
One thing anon left out is that they didn’t actually realize what was going on at the time, and they witnessed something called “Saint Elmo’s Fire” which looks a bit like the way they show stars whizzing past the Enterprise in Star Trek when they warp. So these pilots were not only flying blind and lame, but the whole time were seeing something that looked like they had just been teleported to another dimension out their window.
Edit: It turns out the full episode is on YouTube. Enjoy!
I’d be so pissed if I was on that plane
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
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.
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:
Islandmountainglacier. Got it. Why didn’t they say that in the first place?
On an island full of mountain glaciers, it does make you wonder how they came up with that name.
That was shortly after their economy crashed. I remember people saying that the last wish of Iceland’s economy was to have its ashes spread across Europe.
