Forty years ago this week on a flight from London to Auckland the unthinkable happened.
As a passenger on the flight James Ferguson took this picture of his wife Sybil using an oxygen mask. Photo: Supplied
As a British Airways Boeing 747 cruised at 37,000 feet on the Kuala Lumpur to Perth leg of the journey, on 24 June, 1982, one engine failed, then another, then another, and then the fourth.
For 15 minutes the plane descended towards the sea and there was nothing the passengers, trapped in the fuselage, could do as they fell towards their deaths.
But, they didn't die. The flight crew never gave up trying and the engines came back to life.
Unbeknown to them they'd flown through an ash cloud from the erupting Mt Galunggung. The ash caused the engines to flame out and damaged the aircraft, while slowly seeping inside.
The passengers, including about 100 New Zealanders, remained calm, as did Captain Eric Moody, first officer Roger Greaves and engineer Barry Townley-Freeman.
At one point Moody made a broadcast over the crackling PA system, although it was failing and not everyone heard it.
"Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Eric Moody.
"We have a small problem. All four engines have failed. We're doing our utmost to get them going. I trust you're not in too much distress, and would the senior cabin crew member please come to the flight deck."
The last clause was the real reason for the message, Moody said, because there was no other way to communicate.
Betty Ferguson was one of the passengers, travelling back to Auckland from London with her mother, Phyl Welch.
"While returning from a holiday trip to Britain the cabin of our Boeing 747 jumbo jet, City of Edinburgh, filled with smoke and the engines were engulfed in flames.
"We totally lost power to all four engines."
Some memories are fading for the 96-year-old, then Betty Tootell, but most have been recorded in her book about the flight, All Four Engines Have Failed: The true and triumphant story of flight BA 009 and the Jakarta Incident.
Betty Ferguson reads a page about the flight from her scrapbook. Photo: RNZ / Jimmy Ellingham
She writes about how stoic the passengers were as, in darkness and with oxygen masks dropping, the odd shudder would break the eerie silence.
At one point a member of the cabin crew asked Ferguson if she was OK and, despite being anything but, she said she was fine.
In the cockpit, Moody and his flight crew were desperately trying to work out what was happening.
Speaking from his home on England's south coast, the 81-year-old said the atmosphere was remarkably calm.
"I'm of a temperament [that] if you take me into a restaurant and give me bad service I can blow, don't you worry.
"But in a big thing like that, in a big emergency, I go into slow-motion mode and I think lucidly through it," he said, admitting he and his colleagues were worried they'd made a mistake.
"When we talked about it afterwards, the three of us, that was the one thing the three of us at the time were thinking, individually - what the bloody hell had we done wrong to cause this?
"The pilot has the mentality that you're to blame, now fix it."
Moody decided to drop to a lower altitude where there was more oxygen. While triple checking everything and after repeated attempts the engines restarted.
He estimated the plane had no engine power for about 15 minutes.
Moody and the crew carefully nursed the jet to Jakarta while facing a new danger, a windscreen so cracked it was impossible to see through. They landed safely.
The Boeing 747 is examined the day after the flight. Photo: Supplied
Ferguson praised the crew's fine work, saying when the engines flamed out she thought her time was up.
"Much later did we learn that in pitch darkness we had flown into a cloud of volcanic ash from the erupting Mt Galunggung in West Java.
"This was a unique event which needed to be recorded for the aviation industry. I decided to take up the challenge."
Ferguson had no trouble finding a publisher and her book came out in 1985.
Moody said no one told the crew about the eruption, and the risks of flying through ash weren't known.
The crew's response became the accepted standard for such situations.
And the flight changed Moody's life - he's still recognised as its captain and it is a regular after-dinner conversation. He said he enjoyed the recognition.
But, sometimes, such as at a recent family occasion for his grandchildren, he thinks of what could have been.
"They were christened recently and, I must say, that on that Sunday lunchtime in church I was quite emotional. I would have missed all this," he said.
"My old granny used to say to me: 'Don't you ever use the word can't. There's no such word in the English language. You're a can-do man.'
"We were bloody minded, three bloody-minded pilots we had there... There's nothing we can't do, I'm told, so you've got to believe it."
The passengers and crew would regularly get together in the following years under the banner of the Galunggung Gliding Club.
Claire Kirkpatrick and her stepmother Betty Ferguson recall the 1982 flight. Photo: RNZ / Jimmy Ellingham
James Ferguson and his wife Sybil were among those on board.
Their daughter Claire Kirkpatrick remembers her shock at finding out what happened when she met them, a day later than expected, at Auckland Airport, having no idea what caused the delay.
"They didn't tell us the drama that was going on until we saw them," she said.
"They were kind of really amazed that they actually survived, because Dad flew in the war. He was an aircraft engineer and he knew immediately when the engines were shutting down something was going wrong.
"It was quite a crisis and a drama, but they were cool, calm and collected during the event."
James and Sybil Ferguson came to see what happened as an adventure.
"They just sang the praises of the crew, especially Captain Eric Moody, who they attributed with saving their lives," Kirkpatrick said.
"The whole thing was a miracle that they managed to restart the engines."
Fellow passengers signed Betty Ferguson's book. Photo: RNZ / Jimmy Ellingham
Kirkpatrick points to Betty Ferguson's book, which is full of interviews with passengers saying prayers, and one woman's story of seeing an angel on a wing she looked out on shortly before the nearby engine became the first to restart.
After Sybil Ferguson's death in 1992, James married Betty Tootell, who became Betty Ferguson. The pair became friends through the gliding club.
In their 20 years together, until James died in 2015, the pair never lost their love of flying.
