‘All four engines have failed’
Thirty-five years ago today, Kiwis were among the 247 passengers aboard a British Airways jet who said their last goodbyes as they plunged towards the ocean. Jimmy Ellingham looks back on 15 minutes of fear.
They were a captive audience and they were about to die. Some prayed, some held their loved ones close, some helped total strangers, but they all knew their time was up. It was June 24, 1982, and British Airways Flight BA 009 was on the Kuala Lumpur-to-Perth leg of its mammoth London-to-Auckland journey.
According to press reports from the time, about 100 passengers were bound for New Zealand.
As the Boeing 747 flew 37,000 feet above the sea near Indonesia, disaster struck. First one engine flamed out, then another, then another.
Unthinkably, the fourth one lost power, too. Strange, illuminated particles lit up the sky outside and smoke filled the cabin.
The situation was dire and everyone knew it.
‘‘I think a lot of people suddenly became religious again, or picked up where they’d left off some years ago and felt comfortable in doing so,’’ says Betty Ferguson, who, then called Betty Tootell, was aboard the flight with her mother, Phyl Welch.
The pair, from England, had settled on Auckland’s North Shore and were returning to their adopted home.
As it became clear a crisis was deepening, oxygen masks dropped and darkness descended in the cabin, yet there was no mass panic as the plane began gliding towards the sea, without power.
Rather, a sense of stoicism filled passengers and crew, who shuffled up and down the aisles offering forlorn reassurance.
Ferguson, now 91, remembers one flight attendant asking if she and her mother were OK.
‘‘I said, ‘yes, we’re fine’. We were anything but fine ... Somebody said to the chief [attendant] ‘you were fortunate’. He said: ‘I had a stiff upper lip, but my lower lip was trembling a bit’, which I thought was lovely,’’ Ferguson says.
‘‘I think a lot of people suddenly became religious again, or picked up where they’d left off some years ago and felt comfortable in doing so.’’ Passenger Betty Ferguson
She and her mother comforted each other as best they could and even joked about putting an oxygen mask on the golliwog the pair had as their travel mascot.
Aucklander Alex Eastwood, now 84, and his daughter Christina were also on the flight.
They were seated apart, but Eastwood managed to briefly check on her and found her holding the hands of two men sitting in her row.
Eastwood had realised something was up when he smelled smoke, thinking fellow passengers must be lighting up in the non-smoking area.
‘‘Then I noticed the smoke coming through the vents ... The next thing that really startled me was the fact that some of the right-side engine was flaming.’’ He thought the plane had been shot at. Helping passengers around him, he didn’t dwell too much on his likely fate.
And, while the cabin crew were putting on a brave public face, Eastwood saw the terror in their eyes when they retreated behind their curtain – and, at one stage, two attendants gave each other a terrified embrace.
Some passengers scribbled notes to family, others worried about being eaten by sharks, as the plane violently shuddered amid the eerie whistling sound that replaced the usual engine noise.
Ferguson’s moving book about the crisis, All Four Engines Have Failed, detailed the thoughts of almost 200 of those aboard for the terrifying 15 or so minutes they thought were their last.
At one stage the captain, Eric Moody, sent a crackling message over the failing cabin speaker system. Heard by few, it said: ‘‘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.’’
Up in the cockpit, Moody and his team were working overtime. They had no idea what was causing the flame-outs.
Gliding as low as 12,000 feet, they turned back towards Indonesia.
Eventually, after dozens of attempts, the engines re-started. One was no good, but three powered the plane back to Jakarta.
Approaching the airport, Moody had virtually zero vision out of the cockpit window – the glass was so scratched and splintered. But he and his crew made it.
‘‘The whole crew were magnificent. They worked out a way to save the aircraft. They went through the manual back and forward,’’ Eastwood says.
On the ground, the extensive damage the Boeing’s exterior suffered was revealed. Investigations uncovered that the plane had flown through a volcanic ash cloud from Mt Galunggung in West Java. It was invisible to weather radar and its ash clogged the engines and scratched every surface.
Passengers spent the night in a hotel until a replacement flight arrived to take them home – except five, who were deported to Singapore.
Despite their ordeal, two Polish women and a Portuguese couple weren’t allowed entry to Indonesia because the countries had no diplomatic relations. Eastwood stayed with them to make sure they were OK.
The passengers and crew kept in touch for years, reuniting under the banner of the Galunggung Gliding Club.