A Dirty Little Secret
Allow me to let you in on a little aviation secret. Those inflatable survival slides that supposedly double as life rafts? That’s not real. Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger successfully ditched his Airbus 320 in the Hudson River back in 2009, but that was a freak exception. Most jet airplanes that hit the water at jet airplane speeds just disintegrate. Ditching in the ocean is nobody’s first choice.
Capt. Moody finally reached the air traffic controllers in Jakarta only to discover that his plane no longer appeared on radar. This evening just kept getting weirder and weirder. That’s when the cabin pressure began to drop precipitously.
The three crewmembers retrieved their oxygen masks, but the First Officer’s example was inoperative. Desperate to keep his friend from suffocating, Moody dove the plane toward the ocean, sacrificing precious altitude for breathable air. For the passengers in the back, this is about as bad as it gets.
At this point, clearing those mountains in a dead airplane was just never going to happen. However, as they reached a lower altitude, the flight crew was relieved to see the weird blue lights outside the cockpit begin to abate. Then, they noticed a familiar roar to the engines. The turbines were now spinning in the slipstream. The flight crew kept cycling through the emergency restart procedures for each engine sequentially. One big turbofan finally coughed to life, followed by another. Eventually, they had all four engines back online. That seemed a good time for another announcement.
Capt. Moody calmly said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We seem to have overcome that problem and have managed to start all the engines.”
Moody gradually began to power the big plane back up into the sky. However, as he climbed, the otherworldly blue light returned, and one of the four engines died. He immediately pushed the yoke forward and dove back toward the deck.
In all of the furor of trying to revive the dying plane, the flight crew had not been looking outside. Now that the aircraft was flying again, they realized that the windscreen was now frosted and opaque. With the exception of one tiny sliver on Moody’s side, the pilots could no longer see outside the cockpit. Like, at all.
Moody and company had just saved a jumbo jet from a complete engine failure in flight. They weren’t going to let an inability to see the runway slow them down. Moody’s copilot called out altitude, airspeed, and heading as he peered through the tiny streak of unspoiled cockpit glass. Miraculously, he managed a perfect touchdown right on the centerline. Paraphrased somewhat for a family-friendly audience, he later described sticking the landing as “A bit like negotiating one’s way up a badger’s butt.”
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