This is a true story about a volcanic eruption. I found an article online and Kennyized it. What follows is my summation of the article with the actual facts interspersed with storytelling. It’s educational but low on laughs.
Writers group prompt…A volcano erupts
START YOUR ENGINES
Have I got a story for you. Picture this: June 24, 1982. British Airways Flight 9, cruising at a smooth 37,000 feet, somewhere over the Indian Ocean. The flight is heading from London to Auckland. Just another day in the friendly skies, right? Wrong. Oh, so very wrong.
Unbeknownst to anyone on board, this big bird was flying straight into a nightmare. Mount Galunggung, a fiery Indonesian volcano, had erupted and decided to throw a little party, spewing a colossal cloud of ash into the atmosphere. BA Flight 9 was about to become intimately acquainted with the ash.
Suddenly, things got weird. Not a little weird, but “oh-my-god-are-we-going-to-die” weird. One engine coughed, then sputtered, then just quit. Before you could say “tea and crumpets,” another engine went. Then a third, then, the grand finale: all four engines, silent. As in, absolutely, positively, stone-cold dead. At 37,000 feet. Over the ocean. In the dark.
Now, in any other cockpit, you might expect screaming, panic, maybe a lot of hyperventilating, but this was British Airways, and in the captain’s seat was a man named Eric Moody. Moody was a man who clearly, had a different definition of “panic.” He took a breath. A calm, collected, dare-I-say British breath. And then he reached for the intercom.
What came next was aviation gold, my friends. Pure, unadulterated, stiff-upper-lip gold. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced with an authoritative british accent as though discussing the weather, he spoke into the intercom simply saying “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.”
A small problem? All four engines dead? The man was a poet. That line didn’t just go down in history; it got a permanent seat at the table of legendary aviation quotes. Not for its drama, but for its sheer, undeniable display of steadiness during a time of crisis.
Ok, back to the story this majestic Boeing 747 was rapidly becoming a very expensive glider. Dropping like a stone through that invisible, engine-choking ash. The crew were in a frantic ballet of restart procedures, and praying to every god in the aviation handbook of which, one assumed, would be many…down, down, down they went. 15,000 feet. 14,000 feet, and then, at a heart-stopping 13,000 feet—just minutes, literally minutes, from splashing into the big blue ocean—a miracle.
One engine sputtered, then coughed, then roared back to life. Oh, the sweet sound of hope! Then another! And another! Miraculously, all four engines were back in business. It was like watching a phoenix rise from the ashes, except the phoenix was a jumbo jet and the ashes were… well, actual ashes. Their windscreen was sandblasted by the ash so they could barely see a thing. Captain Moody and his crew pulled off the impossible. They landed safely in Jakarta. Every single one of the 248 souls on board survived.
Investigators later figured out it was volcanic ash – utterly invisible on radar – that had choked the engines.
What did the passengers remember most from their ordeal? Not the ash. Not the terror. It was that voice. Captain Moody’s composure. His leadership under unimaginable pressure, became a textbook case, taught in flight schools and disaster response programs for years. He didn’t sugarcoat. He didn’t hide the danger, but he remained so unbelievably steady and oh so british in his commands, which, by doing so, gave everyone else the courage to be steady, too.
If that ain't a story worth retelling, I don't know what is.
© 2025 Kenneth Kates
Really well told Kenny!