The Miracle of Flight 9

230 feet long with a wingspan of 195 feet and white with a red stripe, the Boeing 747 was one hell of a plane.  On June 24, 1982, a British Airways Flight 9, the City of Edinburgh, on the route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Perth, Australia had on board 263 souls.  Captain Eric Moody had been flying for years and had loads of experience, which he would need.

For the first ninety minutes of the flight, everything was fine.  They were 2,000 miles from their destination.  But once they began to cross the Indian Ocean things started to go wrong. Smoke started to leak into the cockpit.  The Captain begins to check the instruments to figure out what was going on but soon he is having trouble reading them in the smoke.

A warning light flashes indicating that an engine is down, but the Captain isn't too worried because he has three other engines.  But soon, one by one, each engine goes down.  There's no way they can make it to Perth and the nearest airport is in Jakarta, Indonesia 150 miles away.  The only way to get there is by gliding and coasting nine miles for a drop of 3,000 miles of altitude loss.

But this will only get them 104 miles before they'll have to land.  As they drop below 34,000 feet their only hope is to get one engine going.  As they reached 12,000 feet one of the engines comes alive and begins working.  Minutes later Moody lands in Indonesia.

It turns out that Mount Galunggung had erupted and the ash rose 40,000 feet in the air from the eruption had gotten into the engines.  It was dark out since it was a night flight so the Captain didn't see any of this.  The City of  Edinburgh was renamed the City of Elgin and was cleaned and refitted to fly again.  Captain Moody received an award for his heroics.  And one of the passengers, Betty Tootell married fellow passenger James Ferguson who was in the seat in front of her.  Tootell wrote a book about their experiences called All Four Engines Have Failed.  This flight was a miracle of a Captain who flew the plane through a disaster safely onto the ground.