British Airways Flight 009

Rare card · No. 36263

British Airways Flight 009, sometimes referred to by its callsign SPEEDBIRD 9 or as the Jakarta incident, was a scheduled British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Auckland, with stops in Bombay, Kuala Lumpur, Perth and Melbourne. On 24 June 1982, the route was flown by City of Edinburgh, a Boeing 747-236B registered as G-BDXH. The aircraft flew into a cloud of volcanic ash thrown up by the eruption of Mount Galunggung around 110 miles (180 km) south-east of Jakarta, Indonesia, resulting in the failure of all four engines. Partly because the event occurred at night, obscuring the cloud, and partly because volcanic ashes were not recognized as a risk for jets at that time, the reason for the failure was not immediately apparent to the crew or air traffic control. The aircraft was diverted to Jakarta in the hope that enough engines could be restarted to allow it to land there. It glided out of the ash cloud, and all engines were restarted (although engine number 2 started vibrating and...

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