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Interviewer: Almost 32 years ago, British Airways flight 9 was on a routine flight from London, Heathrow to Auckland, New Zealand with stops in Bombay, Madras, Kuala Lumpur, Perth and finally Melbourne. On the night of the 24th of June, 1982, 'City of Edinburgh' - a Boeing 747-200 with 248 passengers on board - was en route to Perth after stopping off at Kuala Lumpur. Less than an hour into the flight, the aircraft flew into a cloud of volcanic ash thrown up by the Indonesian volcano, Mount Galunggung, which resulted in the failure of all four of the Boeing's engines. The captain of that flight was Eric Moody.

Welcome to FlightSim.Com, Eric Moody. It's good of you to take the time to talk to us.

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Eric: Well good afternoon to you.

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Interviewer: It's almost 32 years ago since that eventful flight. Does it seem that long ago?

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Eric: Well I...yes it does, it does seem that long ago. I'm just amazed that people are still interested in it because I thought the interest would last about six months.

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Interviewer: And here we are 32 years later and you're - and people - are still talking about it.

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Eric: Yes, and it will go on, I'm sure.

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Interviewer: Well you know, I know that a lot of people will be interested about what happened on that night back in 1982 but I was wondering if it will be possible, for a moment, to talk about when you first started flying, and how you eventually became a pilot of a 747.

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Eric: Yeah it was a bit of a slow start really. I wanted to fly from the age of about four. I wanted to be a fighter pilot.

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Interviewer: Right.

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Eric: But at that stage we lived down on the edge of the New Forest and my father knew quite a few BOAC aircrew - those pilots, navigators in those days, and radio officers in those days as well - and I got talking to them, and I'd changed my ambition by about the age of eight to becoming a BOAC pilot. BOAC Captain, in fact, I wanted to be. And I went to one of those schools that had a combined cadet force, and I joined the RAF section. Went flying with them (but I mean, it's like a glorified ATC, you do it at school) and I went flying with them in things like Ansons and Chipmunks, Bailliel, I flew in, and all sorts of funny things. And then at the age of 16, they sent me gliding and I got an A and B license of gliding. And the very next year, I got an RAF flying scholarship - I think flying scholarships are still about now, but I don't think the RAF control them, I think it's more of a civilian thing now - and I think they gave me, it was either £300 or £350, to do 30 hours flying and that was in 1958.

Interviewer: Wow.

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Eric: If you can imagine £300 now... I mean, I had three airplanes when I retired in 1996 and I wouldn't have sold you two hours on the smallest one for £300. So I got 30 hours and I got a PPL. And that was on a Hornet Moth, Tiger Moth and we did some spinning in the Chipmunk. So at 17, I had a PPL.

Being now a member of the Hampshire Aeroplane Club, because I did it down here in Eastleigh, which is next to Hampton airport. And it was a grass airfield at the time; there was no hard runway, no radio, it's all varied lights, varied flares and, you know, aldis lamp signals, so it's very primitive because, come on let's be honest, aviation is not an old thing is it? It's only been about just 110 years since we got in the air.

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Interviewer: That's right.

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Eric: Yeah, so I mean it was 50 odd years ago now. And I was used to... I carried on flying at the aero club and I got to know quite a lot of the instructors (you hear lots of chatter), of the instructors from what was then AST (Air Service Training) at Hangbourne on the Southampton water, where they had a flying school. And all sorts of tuition was given there, both for engineers and for pilots, and I learned that BOAC and BEA, the two nationalized airlines, were going to buy it and form it into a college to mimic Cranwell. They wanted to have their own in-bred pilots purely for civil aviation. And that changed my direction a bit because I had every intention of going to the Air Force, getting a short service commission and going, ultimately, like everybody else did. However, I stayed an extra year in school. In 1960, I was one of the first people to be interviewed. In fact I was one of the first people to be accepted to the college of air training.

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Interviewer: Okay.

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Eric: So I thought that life was fantastic, and it was all very good. I was due to go there at the end of August in 1960 and about two weeks before I was due to go, they sent me a letter saying, "We're sorry but we've re-assessed your application and your interview and we now find you're medically unfit."

So that rather drew the rug from under my feet. It threw me a bit. But I, we protested it (my father and I) and we got other people involved to protested it. But they wouldn't change their mind. There were three things listed and what it came down to was - they got rid of two which were factious, and the third one was almost equally as factious - but this thing in the middle of my face, my nose, was crooked, and I suppose I couldn't argue very much because it was slightly crooked.

And when we accepted, I said, "Okay well, you don't want me this year or this intake. Can I come on the next one then?" Because I'd never ever failed a Ministry medical in my career...

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Interviewer: Right.

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Eric: ...And I didn't then, because the Ministry said, "No, you're okay!"

And basically they wouldn't change their minds. So they said, "No, no. You're not medically fit enough for us." And then they came up with, "You've got to last 28 years; we want to make sure we'll get that out of you if we train you."

Which was stupid again but there we are, that was...yeah, well that's the airline management for you. And what then happened was, they wanted 42 cadets to go down on three courses of 14.

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Interviewer: Right.

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Eric: And they'd gone to universities and they'd said, "Look, we want 50 people, 42 people to come; how many should we select (remembering that we have, we want educational qualifications)? How many should we select if we were to allow for people not getting their exam passes?"

And the universities all said, "Well, take 50."

So they took 50 and they chose 50 people who had already all got their A levels, things they needed, so there was no chance of anybody failing anything because they already had it. And so they had to get rid of eight. I was one - I went with my crooked nose - other people went with in-growing toenails and others such stupid things. But that was, you know, dreadful.

So my father sent me off here to see a specialist in Southampton and I went to see him (and I've noticed ever since, anything to do with Ear, Nose and Throat - ENT - specialists, and in fact the aviation doctors as well, have all got noses that either go one way or the other, and they've all got crooked noses).

Anyway, he had a look at it and we had a little talk about it and he knew me, he knew what I wanted to do - and I told him - and he said, "Well I'm awfully sorry, I'm going to have to disappoint you because that nose is not crooked enough for me to do anything, and that ethically I'll be breaking the rules if I have a go because chances are, I will make it worse than it is." No matter how I pleaded with him he wouldn't do it. So he then said to me (I suppose to get rid of me), "How old are you?" and I said 19. And he said, "Well I'll tell you what," and he explained that your body or your bones set, your body changes, every seven years. He said, "Come back when you're 21," which was two years later.

So on June the 7th 1962, I knocked on his door again and I said, "Hello." "Oh," he said, "Hello, you're that chap who wants to be a pilot." I said, "That's right," and I said, "You told me to come back when I'm 21, and I'm 21 today." "Ah," he said, "I didn't mean exactly when you're 21." But I said, "Well I'm really keen to go off and try and take this." I said, "I've got a PPL and I fly aeroplanes, and I wanted to have another go at being a professional pilot."

So he had another look and he said, "Well, it hasn't changed. It's exactly the same." So I pleaded with him again and he said, "No, no I can't do anything to it because it's exactly the same as I told you before." So I wouldn't go away and in the end he said, "Okay come back in October this year and I'll have another look." So I went back in October and 10 days later he had me in hospital and under a local anaesthetic (well if you know me I'm a real wimp when it comes to medical things. I hate pain and I can't stand the sight of blood, especially my own).

I laid on the slab, blind-folded, with this local anaesthetic, and I had about...an operation which took just about an hour. And it was all very fine, and you could hear the squelching and, you know, the scraping noises. It felt unpleasant and at the end he said, "Okay, I'm nearly finished now." He said that 'you'll feel this I'm afraid, and this will hurt.' And then he said, "Hammer, nurse. Chisel," and, yeah, I felt that bit but he took the bits off the end.

So, I wrote to BOAC and I said "Right, I have a letter now that says my nose is straight. Can I, will you, accept me?" "Well we'll have to do the interview again, and the first thing you've got to do is the interview process, the first thing you'll have to do is the medical."

So my wife - well she was my girlfriend then - we went up to Heathrow one cold January morning, well, January 1963. I walked across the tarmac there, I went into a...the BOAC medical center and sat at the desk in front of me when I went in, was this little doctor that I came to know quite well.

And he was infamous in the aviation business, Alan SybiI (poor chap's dead now), and really his big claim to fame was that he put 11 of the 'F' words in a 15-word sentence and made sense! But he was great. I'll cut the expletives out but he sat there and he was, he really was cursing and swearing over the note he was reading. And he had his glasses on the end of his nose. In the end he looked up and he said, "You've been through all this pain?" I said, "Well, yes sir." He said, "What, just to be a pilot?" I said, "Well yeah, I really want to do it." And he said, "Do you know, look at my nose." I said I've noticed. It was awful, it was crooked as hell. He said, "I wouldn't have that done, that's a dreadful operation. If you're that keen...sit still." So he went off and he came back a few minutes later and he said, "There you are. It's a piece of paper, it's got my signature on it and it's got Dr. Petler's," (I think it was. But he was the senior medical officer). He said, "Now bugger off and have a good life." I said, "But don't you want to see..." "No, I don't want to look up your nose!" And nobody's looked at it since.

So I went out to Hamble for two years, the college of air training, thoroughly loved that, and then I graduated in... So I did 200 hours on a Chipmunk and another 70 or 80 on an Apache, got my commercial pilot license and everything else, and that was it. Oh yeah, so I graduated there in 1965, in August.

And then BOAC of course, because I was sponsored by BOAC, they (my second brush with management and you'll find out how inefficient they are), they wrote a letter to us, in the June actually, saying, "Whilst you may have been sponsored by BOAC, BOAC will have no jobs in the foreseeable future." So he/they, said, "But we've managed to get you a job at BEA." And I'm not a lover of short-haul flying, never have been, didn't want to do it. Anyway, I trained on the Vanguard and, very quickly, we were up and down Amber, 1 between Heathrow and Glasgow, Heathrow and Edinburgh, Heathrow and Belfast, Heathrow and Manchester, with the occasional trip down to Gibraltar, Palma or Malta.

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Interviewer: That was a turboprop, was it, the Vanguard?

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Eric: Well a V-air, four mighty tynes, they were, yeah but it was a bit of a...yeah. It was British, wasn't it, you see. It was a bit, yeah...I say no more. And we, I thought that's it, I don't really enjoy this, but it's a flying job, and you either like short-haul flying or you don't. I then, I actually got married at the beginning of January, the first week of January, so it coincided with the purchase of a house we had, we bought.

Through the letterbox fell the flight for that week, and I opened it up and it was a half page or full page advertisement - 'BOAC needs pilots.' Now, it was only six months or so, seven months - or maybe, I'll give them eight months - after being told, 'In the foreseeable future, we will not be recruiting pilots.' They were after...pilots, and so their vision isn't very long and it certainly hasn't changed over all these years.

Now I wrote and said, "Look, I am a pilot, you did pay for my training I want to come to you." And they wrote back and said, "Oh we'd love to have you, but we have a no-poaching agreement with BEA." Anyway, it took myself and 41 others to fight all summer - no, we didn't fight all summer, we fought for ages with them - and in the end they agreed that if we worked the summer out with them, they would let us go to BOAC in the autumn of that year.

So on October the 30th - or are their 31 days? - no, October 31st in 1965, I worked for both airlines. I was a BOAC pilot and they trained me on the VC10. And then, you had to get a Nav license as well because you used to stick a sexton out the top and shoot the stars; you draw lines on charts and find fixes. So navigation's changed in that time because we used to think we knew where we were or had been. Now you know where you are with INS and FMS and all this sorts of things. So aviation has changed a lot in 15 years or 16 years.

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Interviewer: So what routes did you fly on the VC?

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Eric: It was nothing, we did all the little bits in between that you don't do now. We used to go out to the...everything was no more than about 10 hour sectors. We'd go out, we'd probably have a European stop on the way. If we went through Rome we always got off and had a night there, and destroyed some brain cells in the wine bars. But you might go to Geneva or Zurich or Frankfurt, and then you go somewhere in the Middle East, around the Gulf or... Beirut is one of my favorite stops in those days. And we went to Baghdad, to Damascus, to Tel Aviv, anywhere around there and then out to Bahrain. Bahrain was a favorite stop. Karachi was another place and we didn't go much further out that way on the VC10 than Singapore. Colombo, in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Singapore, we'd go down through Africa because the airplane was built to go down airfields.

And then if you were considered to be fairly good or relatively good (because they didn't like everybody doing it, it was, there was more money in it) we used to fly the Atlantic as well. Go to the Eastern Seaport, America, and we'd go for a long while. We had New York/Bermuda trips and the Caribbean also. It was, so it was quite a varied lifestyle and I had loved it no end. I was the First Officer...yeah.

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Interviewer: The VC10 had one of the low undercarriages, didn't it so that it could land on short, was it short airfields, short airports? Runways?

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Eric: Actually it was the short airfields.

But it had tremendous performance, it was so overpowered. I mean, it was true that you could outperform, certainly the V-force in the climb rate because we had a competition one time in Lima, in Peru, I remember, with a Vulcan and we left them way behind. You weren't supposed to do that sort of thing but, I mean, you got away with things in those days because you weren't being monitored. Now, with this ACAR's, they know what you're up to so you have to be a bit more careful.

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Interviewer: So you could actually, you actually had a race against a Vulcan Bomber?

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Eric: In climb, yes.

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Interviewer: Wow.

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Eric: And yeah, we beat it, yes and that was...

I did that for five years, as a First Officer and then in '76, the Jumbo, 747, the first one to come to BOAC - they bought six I think it was, maybe five, in the '70s. 1970. And they put out a notice asking for First Officers to volunteer, and some pilots are just reluctant to go on new airplanes. I absolutely, I recommend it to anybody because it was a wonderful, wonderful experience being one of the first, First Officers on the 747s. I bid for it and then BALPA, one of the pilots union, kept it on the ground, which actually did BOAC a favor because the engines were Pratt and Whitney JT939 or something, they were dash three's, anyway, and they were absolute rubbish. You used to struggle like hell to get to cruising speed. Going across the Atlantic, we flew up, it was very, very sluggish, but it was tremendous fun. But the engines were rubbish, they kept failing everywhere. I can remember on one occasion, one night we had all six or five of our fleet marooned between Heathrow and Johannesburg because they were taking off with the spare one underneath, spare engine underneath, because one had lost a donk somewhere else, and they wanted to replace it. And it was diverting into Istanbul or somewhere else, because one of his engines had gone as well, and so they had to use the engine they had carried underneath to get the aeroplane on its way. So they had all five or six marooned between London and Johannesburg.

Anyway, it was great fun. I loved that and I did that for five years till '76 and then I had the chance to get a command on the VC 10, so I went. I wanted to go on to a 747 because I like Boeings but I had to get my command on the VC 10, and so I went back to doing what I'd done before. The routes had changed quite a lot because at that stage the aeroplane was in decline and it was coming to the end of its life. By 1980 - 81 it was, I suppose - I went back to the 747-200, now as the captain. I think it only went on for around four years, then it disappeared.

So that's how I got into it, and I was on the Jumbo, then wound my way through 200's through the '80's, and in 1990 I went on a 400 course and I finished off on the 400.

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Interviewer: Was there a lot of performance difference between the 200 and the 400?

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Eric: Not really, but I did like flying with the flight engineer. There was something wrong, not having a flight engineer. I'm not into automatics. Once you start to automate, in my view, it does become, on occasions, less efficient, and I would hate to have done my 1982 episode in a 400 because things happen so quickly. Your mind (quickly for us, anyway), when you've got these notices or things, or these things scrolling in front of your eyes, and, you know, clicking through all these messages too, it's a hell of a job for a human brain to keep up with it.

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Interviewer: Do you think the outcome in 1982 might have been different if you hadn't had that engineer?

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Eric: Oh, he was great. I mean, he was training engineers. He really was red hot. He recognized the engines were failing before they did, almost, and he worked like a dingbat. I mean, I've never seen anybody sweat on the flight deck like, but he did and he was...well, we all wanted to live, you see. They were dour Yorkshireman and fighters, and I'm a...I come from the depths of Hampshire, so I reckon we're more bloody-minded. They didn't.

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Interviewer: So going back to that; if we go forward then to that flight in 1982, when did you first start to realize that something was not right?

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Eric: Well it was...I was in the loo, or one of us. I went to go to the loo, I'd looked on the radar and there was nothing there. And I said, "I'm going back to the loo." And because we only had two hundred and (I think you had one wrong. We had 247 passengers and 13 crew), I think it was 247. You probably know more than I do; it's ages since I looked at my piece of paper. But we had all the passengers downstairs. The upstairs cabin was empty and in darkness because we only had 13 cabin crew on board; three were sick in Kuala Lumpur. And what I'd arranged was, they'd put all the passengers downstairs so that we could man the doors and we'd be legal, and it made it easier for the cabin crew if everybody was downstairs anyway.

So the cabin at the back was in darkness. I got out to go to the loo, and there was somebody in our toilet. So I thought, well first-class passenger or a steward or stewardess or something. So I thought, well I'll kill two birds with one stone and I'll go down the stairs, I'll speak to the cabin crew, make sure they're getting all the service OK and no problems, and I'll go to the loo down there. So I got to the bottom of the stairs and I was talking to the purserette, the lady purser at the front, and she told me, you know, how it was all going.

When the little girl (short stewardess) who was in the loo, came out, went on the flight deck and was sent to get me. And as I went up the stairs, I could see what looked, appeared, to be smoke bellowing out from around the floor level where the air conditioning air comes in. And it smelled of an acrid...like a burning electrical smell. So I went on the flight deck expecting them to say that we had a fire in the electrical bay, or smoke in the electrical bay; can they fire the fire extinguisher?

Well nothing was further from the truth because they were watching a wonderful display of St. Elmo's fire on the windscreen. And St. Elmo isn't that rare if you get the right conditions, and I'd seen it hundreds of times in my career. But this was really intense and the longer we sat there watching it, the better it got, the more attractive it got, the prettier it got and all these lovely beautiful colors were floating up and down the windscreen, shimmering up and down. And it developed into short lightning, dashing up and down, and eventually it looked like there was tracing, coming off the nose because it was sparkling.

So we were watching that, and I was...you know, you sit there in your seat with your straps on you and you look on the radar to see where the cloud is coming from. You're watching the aeroplane, watching the engines and we were just sat there, the three of us were, just taking all this in, when the flight engineer said, "Number 4 engine has failed," and I looked at him. I mean, God knows how he, I mean, it was winding down very, very, very slowly, it was winding down. I sat there and we got a bit of, well, we got a bit of slip on because the old ball underneath the turbines slip indicator went out to one side. So you have to assume that the engine's failed or failing, it's not developing power, so I put a bit of rudder in it (the autopilot was still in) and I called for that one to be shut down, which the other two did between them. And I understand now, that took 30 seconds. And then the engineer said, "Number 2 is gone, number 3 is gone. We've lost the lot."

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Interviewer: Wow.

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Eric: And that was how quick it was. So we had the next, sort of... It took us 15, 16 minutes before they were all going again but they were only totally not going for about 13 minutes because they started up.

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Interviewer: What was going through your mind when the engines were dying?

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Eric: Well, it doesn't matter when they are dying. I thought somebody had done something wrong because it doesn't happen, does it? It doesn't happen. Four engines don't fail, not unless you've made a cock-up and you've fed all four engines off one tank. And really, I can't remember thinking anything other than, "I don't believe this," but that's, you know, I may have...yeah, I'll have to think about that because I can't remember.

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Interviewer: So you've got all four, all four engines have gone. Then the plane must have been sinking quite a bit at that time.

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Eric: No, no, no, no. We were confused because BOAC in its wisdom - and British Airways afterwards - had practiced four-engine failures on the 747s right from the inception of the airplane. BOAC, they were the only airline so to do, but we did it on the simulator.

Now, simulator training is fantastic as long as, when it happens for real, it's similar in the airplane. And it wasn't. There was one big thing because in the simulator when all four engines fail, the first thing that happens is you get a total electrical failure and the autopilot pops out. When the autopilot pops out, there's a hell of a klaxon that goes off, then you had to silence that before you could hear yourself speak let alone think.

Well, our autopilot stayed in. I looked...the first thing I did, was look at the electrical power and we had a total power, electrical power failure indicated but the autopilot had stayed in, so that's more confusing than ever. And wherever we looked, we were confused. When we got on the ground and talked about it, all three of us said, "That was ever so confusing because this is...we've been told that would happen, and it didn't," and that was the biggest confusing thing in all our minds. We were all expecting certain things to happen that didn't. So, yeah.

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Interviewer: So when the engines died, how high were you?

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Eric: We were at 37,000 feet and of course the autopilot tried to hold us there, and that was the first thing that confused me. Yes they had all failed because with the autopilot there (no power), there was only one way it could hold 37,000 feet which was what it had been told to do, and that's to raise the nose. Well if you raised the nose with no power going, your speed's going to drop and if you let that drop far enough, you can stall. So what I did was, I sat there and watched and watched, and when the speed started to drop, I took the height lock out. I wound in a bit of a descent, only about 1200-1300 feet a minute on the autopilot and I turned to the left, off the airway, which at that time was the conventional way to go.

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Interviewer: Wow. And when did the engines actually start running again?

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Eric: Well they didn't go for the... The first one started up about 13 or so minutes after they all stopped and we were down at 12,500...well, it started just below the 13,000 feet. It started to wind up very slowly like it, like it had when it had failed. So that was number 4. That was the first one we shut down completely. On the way down I'd said that we'd reinstated that engine because it was obvious to me they all stopped for the same reason and although it said in the book we weren't supposed to do that, we did. We reinstated and that was a good job we did because it was the first one to start and it was the least damaged of all the engines actually, I think, that one. That started up about 13 minutes after we had no engines going for starting up and then we had to wait a minute and - 1:26 seconds I think it was for number 3 to start up - and then 1 and 2 came on 30 seconds after that. So if you added it all up it was 15 or so minutes, 15/16 minutes, before we had them all going again.

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Interviewer: You had a very interesting way of communicating to the passengers that there was something wrong with the aircraft.

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Eric: Well, I didn't want to talk to the passengers, quite honestly. I was, I mean there's no point. You don't need to frighten them anymore than they're frightened, and I didn't know what they could see and what they had heard. But I was trying to get a hold of the Chief Steward.

I tried on the telephone system; that wasn't working or he wasn't answering so the only way I could communicate was to speak on the PA, and even then not all the passengers heard because it wasn't working throughout the aircraft. And I did, I did make a mention. That did go through my mind, that if you are going to talk on PA you don't want to sound panicky, you've got to sound ever so laid back in the cockpit and sort of treat it all as 'matter-of-fact,' as though it happens every day, which is what I did, I hope, because we didn't get any panic, anywhere.

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Interviewer: No, and what you said was, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain, speaking. We have a small problem".

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Eric: Yeah, and 'all four engines have failed, we're doing our upmost to get them going. I trust you're not in too much distress. Chief Steward please come to the flight deck.'

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Interviewer: Wonderful. So your engines - you've got one engine, you've said some of the engines have come back on but before you've-

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Eric: They are all on, they're all back on.

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Interviewer: They are all back on, okay. So they are all back on and you were aiming for Kuala Lumpur.

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Eric: No, we were only just off Java. In fact, we weren't that far from where they're looking...well, we were, we were quite some way from, about a thousand miles I think, from where they're looking now for that...yeah.

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Interviewer: Okay, but you had a mountain range or something which you had to -

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Eric: We had... Along the western coast of Java there are a range of hills along there, and mountains. I mean there are about 93, I think 92/93, volcanoes along that western edge of Java. And, I mean, I knew what the safety height was, it was about 10,500 feet and we were at 12,000. That was the lowest we got, it was 12,000 feet. And I immediately made a decision that (you see we had no idea why these engines had stopped, we had no idea why, except we were trying, why they'd started), and I said, we've got to get this on the ground somewhere, as soon as we can. And the nearest airfield was Jakarta.

So we were talking to Jakarta by this stage, on VHF, and I said that's where we're gonna go but they couldn't see us on the radar because this high ground was shielded, we were shielded by the high ground. We weren't certain they could see us. So they asked me to climb up to 15,000 feet which is what we did, and the St. Elmo's started again. So not being slow, I said let's get out of here quickly, and I pulled the thrust levers back to descend. And then we got two engines, sorry, number 2 engine, on the left by my ear, started a backfire surge (and the flames were coming out; massive flames shooting forward) and I'd had surges in my life, dozens of them, and this was the most spectacular surge I'd ever seen. And it was going 'Boom boom!' and making the aeroplane shake. I let it go three or four or five times and I thought that's going to shake itself off the wing, it was that violent, and so I ordered that one to be shut down. I think five engine failures in 20 minutes, is a bit, I think it's another world record.

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Interviewer: Yeah.

[0:36:14]

Eric: Anyway...then we're back on three engines and I landed it on three.

[0:36:19]

Interviewer: But you had a problem when you were landing; you couldn't see anything though.

[0:36:24]

Eric: No, I couldn't see anything out the front, forward, except for two inches stripped down to the left hand side of my windscreen, and two inches down the right hand side of the co-pilot's windscreen.

[0:36:31]

Interviewer: And you had no ILS to-

[0:36:34]

Eric: Well, we had no glidescope, we had a center line, the localizer was working, the glidescope wasn't working, there were...there were VASIs I think, I'm not sure, but I had to sit on the edge of the seat. I couldn't reach the thruster levers. It was the most skillful part of the whole approach, and the best crew cooperation you could get. It was a real three-man effort to get that aeroplane on the ground, just the approach bit.

When we parked, we parked within 10 feet of the terminal building - we were towed in eventually - and we went up the next day to see the aeroplane in daylight (and of course, I mean, we haven't stressed of course, that this whole thing happened in pitch black, the whole thing, the whole episode; it was 9 o'clock at night where we were) but when we went back the next day and walked within 10 feet of the building, you couldn't see it. That's how bad the windscreen was; it was opaque.

[0:37:37]

Interviewer: I think one of the reasons why it's remembered so much is because it was such a team effort.

[0:37:45]

Eric: Well yeah. I know that just after that... In those days we'd heard nothing of whatever they call it these days - Crew Cooperation...I can't think what it's called now. They do courses on it, don't they? Oh dear, I can't think of the name of the courses they do, but the Australian military wrote an article in their equivalent of AirCrews, which is the RAF thing here, saying it was a good example of AOC. Anyway they were talking about this crew cooperation here - a flash through my mind then but I'm getting old, I've got more memory loss these days. My disk is full, I think you'd say, in terms of computers. But some people have made a living out of running courses on this and I think the CAA have got, you have to pass something before you can get your licenses. It's all part of what I would call bull-shit but you've either got it or you haven't. You know, to me crew cooperation was airmanship, it used to be called as well. Airmanship - you don't hear that term nowadays.

[0:38:53]

Interviewer: No. No you don't.

[0:38:57]

Eric: Airmanship to me is very important.

[0:39:00]

Interviewer: So because of your success people have to do extra work now?

[0:39:04]

Eric: Well, I got the blame because there was nothing written in manuals about volcanic ash incursions, now every commercial aeroplane now, in their operations manual has a section on incursions into volcanic ash. And I think they've changed one thing in thirty years, and that is when you first recognize a St.Elmo's Fire, then you throttle back. We left the throttle levers where they were but you throttle back now to lessen the damage. But that took them till about 2008 before they changed it, the procedure. So, you know, when you've got micro seconds to think about things, these people sit over diagrams and wiring diagrams for months and years and then they come up and say, well, you know, if you'd done this... Many times in my career I've said, yes, sir, they were dead right but I had two seconds to think of that, you've had six months.

[0:39:59]

Interviewer: That's right, it's always on the hindsight?

[0:40:01]

Eric: Well a pilot's always in the wrong, he's always going to get the blame unless you can prove your innocence.

[0:40:08]

Interviewer: Yeah. Well, Eric, it's been wonderful that you spent the time actually to tell us all this and, you know, for all the people listening; Do you have any advice to anybody who's interested in kind of taking up flying or has wishes or desires to become a commercial pilot? Do you have any tips?

[0:40:28]

Eric: Yes I do and that is never give up. Illegitimi non carborundum - 'Never let the bastards get you down.' Keep trying and you will get there. I haven't met a decent pilot yet, in my life, who hasn't had some sort of story like I've got, about my nose, or something like that. You all...well they put hurdles in your way, sometimes a steeplechase, those steeplechase fences.

[0:40:56]

Interviewer: Well Eric, thank you ever so much for taking the time to talk to FlightSim.Com and, that's wonderful. Thank you very much.

[0:41:03]

Eric: It's been my pleasure.

[Recording Stopped] [0:41:03]

More Information:

http://www.ericmoody.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9