British Airways Flight 9

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British Airways Flight 9
British Airways Boeing 747-200 Silagi-1.jpg

The affected machine in 1980

Accident summary
Accident type Failure of all engines due to volcanic ash
place Galunggung Volcano , Jakarta , Indonesia
date June 24, 1982
Fatalities 0
Survivors 263 (all)
Injured 0
Aircraft
Aircraft type Boeing 747-236B
operator British Airways
Mark G-BDXH
Surname "City of Edinburgh"
Departure airport United KingdomUnited Kingdom London Heathrow
Stopover IndiaIndia Mumbai Chennai Kuala Lumpur Perth
IndiaIndia
MalaysiaMalaysia
AustraliaAustralia

AustraliaAustralia Melbourne

Destination airport New ZealandNew Zealand Auckland
Passengers 248
crew 15th
Lists of aviation accidents

British Airways Flight 9 was a scheduled British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Auckland , New Zealand , with stops in Bombay , Madras , Kuala Lumpur , Perth and Melbourne . On June 24, 1982, the City of Edinburgh , a Boeing 747-200 ( 236B ) with the registration number G-BDXH, flew into a cloud of volcanic ash that resulted from the eruption of the Gunung Galunggung volcano . When flying through the ash cloud, all four engines failed . After a long gliding flight , the crew - who had no information about the volcanic eruption and therefore could not explain the engine failures and the other phenomena that had occurred, not knowing the cause - succeeded in restarting the engines and finally with three engines running at the airport Jakarta / Halim Perdanakusuma emergency landing.

Course of the incident

The first signs arose around 8:40 p.m. local time - this corresponds to 1:40 p.m. UTC - over the Indian Ocean at an altitude of 37,000  ft (approx. 11,300 meters) south of the Indonesian island of Java .

While the captain, Eric Moody, was in the toilet, first officer Roger Greaves and flight engineer Barry Townley-Freeman first noticed an effect similar to the Elm fire on the cockpit windows. They had the impression that tracer ammunition hit the panes. Although on the weather radar could not see anything, they shut as a precaution, the de-icing and activated the fasten seat belt in the cabin.

Smoke began to gather in the air in the passenger cabin. At first it was thought to be cigarette smoke; However, when this became denser, there was unrest among the passengers. Passengers who could look out a window noticed that the engines appeared unusually bright, as if something was shining through the engine blades.

At 13:42 h ( UTC ) engine no. 4 (far right) suffered a flameout . The first officer and the flight engineer immediately initiated the necessary countermeasures. The master compensated for the asymmetrical thrust with the rudder trim. Passengers noticed yellowish glow emanating from the remaining engines. Less than a minute after the first engine failure, engine no. 2 (inside left) also suffered a burst flame. Shortly afterwards, the two remaining engines failed almost simultaneously.

The Boeing 747 was now gliding . A 747 has an approximate glide ratio of 15. This means that it can glide 15 km for one kilometer loss of altitude. The City of Edinburgh would have been able to glide around 169 kilometers (91 nm ) from its current altitude (around 11,300 meters) .

The static charging of the ash particles resulted in electrical discharges that were similar to Elmsfeuer and impaired radio communication.

At 1:44 p.m. (UTC), the pilots of flight BA009 reported an air emergency to the responsible air traffic control . The content of the message was that all four engines had failed. Jakarta Area Control misinterpreted the message to mean that they believed only engine # 4 had failed. It was only after the message was passed on by a Garuda Indonesia plane that Jakarta became aware of the full extent of the emergency. The loss of all engines did not go unnoticed by the passengers. While some gave up and surrendered to fate, others wrote farewell letters to their relatives. Remarkably, however, there was little panic, even after the cabin pressure dropped later due to the failed engines and the oxygen masks fell from the ceiling.

In the cockpit, attempts were still being made to reach the air traffic controllers in Jakarta for radar guidance. However, these had no radar contact with the Boeing, whose pilots had meanwhile set the internationally common transponder code 7700 for an air emergency .

Despite the tension and the time pressure, the captain managed to make an announcement that went down in aviation history as a masterpiece of understatement :

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.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a little problem. All four engines have failed. We are doing our utmost to start them again. I trust that you will not be too worried. "

Since the oxygen mask of co-pilot Greaves was defective, the captain decided to descend with a rate of descent of 1,800 meters per minute to an altitude at which it was possible to breathe almost normally even without an external oxygen supply.

At 13,500 ft (4,100 meters) the crew attempted one last time to start the engines. Then you would have turned around and tried a very risky ditching. Although there are procedures for this, no one had previously had to ditch a Boeing 747 (there has never been such an attempt with a Boeing 747). Engine no. 4 started at 13:56 (UTC) and the master immediately began to reduce the descent with the thrust of this engine. Shortly afterwards, engine no. 3 could be started again, followed by the other two engines. Even if they were no longer running smoothly, the crew was surprised by this happy turn and asked to be allowed to climb to an altitude of 15,000 ft (4,600 meters).

When they had reached the desired height, the tracer effect reappeared. The captain then reduced the thrust. However, there were faults in engine no. 2, which is why it was switched off. It was then decided to descend again to 12,000 ft (3700 meters). During the night approach to Jakarta, the crew found it difficult, despite the good weather, to see details through the quasi-sandblasted cockpit windows. Therefore, the entire approach had to be carried out in instrument flight , even though a component of the instrument landing system (ILS), the glide path transmitter of the airfield, was not in operation. The crew could see the runway lights through a small, transparent patch on the windshield, but not the light beam from their own landing lights, and assumed that they were defective. After landing, due to the very limited view, it was not possible to taxi over the taxiways to the parking position , as the floodlights on the apron broke too much in the windshield and were too dazzling. Therefore the City of Edinburgh had to wait for a tug .

evaluation

Some damaged engine parts on display at the Auckland Museum

Post-incident investigations revealed that the City of Edinburgh's fourfold engine failure was caused by a cloud of volcanic ash flying through it. This cloud came from a violent eruption of the Gunung Galunggung volcano. Since the ash cloud was dry, it did not produce an echo on the weather radar, which is only able to detect moisture (e.g. in the form of clouds). When flying directly through the cloud, the fine ash particles were sucked in in large quantities by the engines, melted and clogged them to a standstill. After being switched off, the engines cooled down; the molten ash froze and then loosened again. Therefore the engines could be started again after some time. According to more recent views, a reduced oxygen content in the volcanic cloud may have contributed to the failure of the engines. Passengers in the volcanic cloud had complained about the stench in the cabin air, which suggests a changed air composition.

Because of the damage, engines 1 to 3 and the windshields had to be replaced in Jakarta. In addition, the kerosene tanks had to be emptied and then cleaned because the fine ash had penetrated through the pressurization ducts and contaminated the fuel. After a transfer flight back to London, engine 4 was also replaced. In addition, significant repairs were carried out to get the aircraft back into operation. The repair crew that was City of Edinburgh after which only "The flying ashtray" ( the flying asian called).

The machine received an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest gliding flight of an aircraft not designed for gliding until it was replaced by an Airbus A330 ( Flight 236 of Air Transat ).

The air space around the Galunggung volcano was temporarily closed; however, he was released a few days later. Only after the flight crew of a Singapore Airlines Boeing 747 had to switch off three engines after crossing the airspace was the airspace permanently blocked by the Indonesian authorities and all air traffic was diverted. A surveillance system was set up to track the movement of the ash cloud.

The cockpit crew received numerous awards, including Her Majesty The Queen's Commendations for Valuable Service in the Air and medals from the British Air Line Pilots' Association . In the aftermath of the incident, the passengers and crew founded the “ Gliding Club Galunggung” ( Galunggung Gliding Club ) to keep in touch. The passenger Betty Tootell wrote a book about the flight, the cockpit crew of which was able to bring all occupants safely back to earth despite the incident.

The G-BDXH City of Edinburgh (serial number 21635), later renamed the City of Elgin , flew for British Airways for 20 years after the incident until it was sold to European Aviation Air Charter in 2002 and decommissioned in 2006. The aircraft was scrapped at Bournemouth Airport in July 2009 ; 150,000 trailers for the British anti-carbon dioxide campaign 10:10 were made from the aluminum of its hull.

As a result of this incident and that of KLM Flight 867 in 1989 over Alaska, the ICAO decided to set up nine Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers to monitor airspace worldwide and warn air traffic.

The airspace closures that were imposed on Europe after the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 were not least justified by the findings from this near-disaster.

literature

  • Betty Tootell: All Four Engines Have Failed . Andre Deutsch, 1985, ISBN 0-330-29492-X .

Web links

Commons : British Airways Flight 9  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Stanley Stewart: Emergency. Crisis situations in the cockpit. Kösler Verlag, 1999, ISBN 978-3-924208-18-9 .
  2. a b c d e f episode "Falling from the Sky" (Eng. "747 in a dive") from the US series Mayday ( Air Emergency , Air Crash Investigation ) [TV documentary series].
  3. n-tv reportage BA flight 009 , aired January 18, 2009
  4. BBC News : When volcanic ash stopped a Jumbo at 37,000ft , "28 years later Capt Mood, ... shows the sort of understatement characteristic of those in his profession." It was, yeah, a little bit frightening. "" , From 15 April 2010, loaded on November 24, 2016
  5. ^ Betty Tootell: All Four Engines Have Failed . Andre Deutsch, 1985, ISBN 0-330-29492-X .
  6. Jörg Handwerg (flight captain) and Odilo Mühling (press spokesman MTU) on lack of oxygen as a general cause of failure of jet engines , accessed on April 25, 2010
  7. ^ Zoe Brennan: The story of flight 009 and the words every passenger dreads. Daily Mail January 27, 2007. Accessed March 22, 2014
  8. Boeing 747 MSN 21635 ( English ) Airfleets.net. Retrieved August 23, 2009.
  9. Flickr photo gallery "From Order to Disorder - The Sad, Sad Death of G-BDXH" , accessed on February 10, 2015
  10. Introducing G-BDXH - 10:10 am's very own Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet ( Memento from April 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on April 17, 2010
  11. cf. z. B. Eyjafjallajökull glacier volcano is back . April 15, 2010. Archived from the original on April 21, 2010. Retrieved on April 28, 2010.