BA Flight 009

I am not a, um... aviophobe, but this story of near crash of BA Flight 009 [link fixed] is very cool.

With unbelievable restraint, Captain Eric Moody addressed British Airways flight 009 as his Boeing 747 drifted inexorably down towards the Indian Ocean.

Displaying the stiff-upper-lip spirit that built an empire, he uttered the words that are every air passenger's worst nightmare: '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 it under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.'

Minutes before, while cruising at ten kilometres above the sea, Captain Moody had instructed his first officer to send a Mayday call to ground control in nearby Indonesia. The date was June 24, 1982, and this extraordinary flight has since gone down in aviation history.

As a new TV documentary investigating the socalled 'Jakarta Incident' makes clear, nothing was quite as one might expect that terrible night.

Incredibly, passengers and crew reacted to the captain's cataclysmic announcement not with screams and hysteria, but with an extraordinary calm as the realisation that they were almost certainly sinking to their deaths hit home.

Looking out of the aircraft windows, they could see that their plane was coated in an eerie white light and that the engines were on fire, with great jets of flame trailing into the sky.

Like I said, the rest is very cool. And as I usually must, I cannot help but relate the story to myself.

I have had a few close calls with car accidents or near-brushes with severe accidents that have just occurred. It is a very strange feeling. I had gone on a long drive with some friends on a quest to find some authentic Mexican food near Rochester, NY. In town there is nothing really good, but the surrounding farm land away from the city is mainly plied with apple orchards, and with them come migrant workers and likewise a good Tinga Con Pollo.

We were driving back along a small country road back to the main highway. It had rained only recently, and the road surface turned out to be especially slippery. Coming down a slight incline towards the highway, my friend applied the brakes only to have the car go into a slide. Meanwhile, traffic was zipping by, and I could see out the left the oncoming cars that would slam into us if we slid out into the road. There was this 2-3 second period were we realized what was going on and how likely an accident was. Of course, the car did stop before the highway, and the driver anxiously explained that the brakes had locked up. It just takes a moment to realize our own mortality.