Anon flies air Chad

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

21 comments

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.
  
  I literally cannot tell the difference.
  Source: am manager, and sometimes my underlings don't toil hard enough in the PowerPoint mines.
  You should mercilessly berate them until morale improves, that's MBA 101.
  You're gonna be back in the PowerPoint mines if you don't fix your soft-hearted attitude.
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
- To go further, pretty certain that jets have wipers. If it was just ash, they could have cleaned it to get some visibility.
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
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_009 Awesome story here
- Moody made an announcement to the passengers that has been described as "a masterpiece of understatement"
  I didn't believe that was an actual quote but here we are.
  On the descent without visibility....
  Moody described it as "a bit like negotiating one's way up a badger's arse."
  Oh my word. HAHAHA!
- If I had a nickel for every time a 747 lost engines going through volcanic ash and recovered with no fatalities, I would have two nickels.
  
  which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
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.
- Seriously fantastic book and it's a quick read. Definitely recommended.
  It's written by a surgeon who was involved in helping promote the use of checklists in healthcare. A lot of the book is about looking at their use in other places like aviation and construction and realizing why they work and how they can help in other places. The book spends a lot of time on the idea that some fields have become so complex with so many pieces that it's impossible for any one person to be able to track it all in their head on the fly and the effect that has in "can't afford failure" industries.
  A book about checklists sounds like it'd be dreadfully dry and boring but the author is a solid writer and the book is full of a ton of really interesting vignettes -- I find people tend to fly through it. I first read it probably 10 years ago and it's one of those books that has really stuck with me since.
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:
  Eyyafyatlayakötül
  
  Or a cognate, Eyfallicle; ey as in island, fall as in a valley(?), icle from icicle.
  Mér líkar þetta málið!
  
  Islandmountainglacier. Got it. Why didn't they say that in the first place?
- 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.
I'd be so pissed if I was on that plane
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!
- it is not ai generated, that photo is from 2014. it is highly edited by the original photographer

21 comments