The Best Airline Captain Announcement Ever Came On A British Airways 747 After All Four Engines Failed

In 1982, a British Airways 747 flew into a cloud of volcanic ash near Indonesia.

One by one, all four of its engines failed.

After falling more than 25,000 feet and preparing to ditch in the Indian Ocean, the plane's crew eventually got the engines restarted. So the story had a happy ending.

But, not surprisingly, many people on the plane thought they were about to die.

I am old enough to remember this incident, but I had forgotten something important about it: What the plane's captain said to the passengers the moment after the engines failed. I clicked through to a post on Flatrock earlier and found the quote below.

Captain Eric Moody was later praised for a cabin announcement that was described as "a masterpiece of understatement."

Moody's announcement was actually more than that.

It was a masterpiece, period. If an exceptional speechwriter had spent a week composing the message, he or she couldn't have done better.

In 37 short, direct, and simple words, Captain Moody conveyed the following:

• What was happening
• The urgency of the situation 
• The crew's intense focus on the problem (without false assurances that they could fix it)
• Concern for the well-being of the passengers (without being patronizing)
• A dry sense of perspective that probably did more to relax the passengers than thousands of words of explanation ever could have.

BA

Captain Eric Moody

Here's what Moody said:

"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."

And here's Wikipedia's description of the incident:

British Airways Flight 9, sometimes referred to by its callsign Speedbird 9 or Jakarta incident,^[1] was a scheduled British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Auckland, with stops in Bombay, Madras, Kuala Lumpur, Perth, and Melbourne.

On 24 June 1982, the route was flown by the City of Edinburgh, a 747-236B. The aircraft flew into a cloud of volcanic ash thrown up by the eruption of Mount Galunggung (approximately 180 kilometres (110 mi) south-east of Jakarta, Indonesia), resulting in the failure of all four engines. The reason for the failure was not immediately apparent to the crew or ground control. The aircraft was diverted to Jakarta in the hope that enough engines could be restarted to allow it to land there. The aircraft was able to glide far enough to exit the ash cloud, and all engines were restarted (although one failed again soon after), allowing the aircraft to land safely at the Halim Perdanakusuma Airport in Jakarta.