>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
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
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.
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.
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.