by ZOE BRENNAN

Last updated at 16:23 29 January 2007

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.'

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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.

The cabin was now filled with a thick, sulphuric smoke, and the mighty jet bucked up and down as if it were a piece of flotsam adrift on stormy seas.

Mothers moved to comfort their children, husbands reached for their wives' hands, and air hostesses worked their way down the cabin, teaming solo passengers with a companion to accompany them into the darkest of nights.

Hours before, the BA scheduled flight had taken off from Heathrow Airport. After the long check-in, the 263 passengers settled into their seats, ordered drinks from the cabin crew, and prepared for the flight which would take them to New Zealand via India, Malaysia and Australia.

At the very back of the enormous jet, Betty Tootell made sure her 80-year-old mother, Phyl, was comfortable, and then began to read the Jane Austen novel she had bought for the journey.

Brought up in Britain, the pair had emigrated to New Zealand three years earlier, and were returning after a summer holiday in suburban London. Seated in front of her, James Ferguson was on his way back from a trip to the Holy Land, and was looking forward to getting home. Some rows ahead, Charles Capewell sat with his two young boys, Chas, ten, and Stephen, seven. In a few hours, the family expected to be reunited with their mother in Perth, Australia.

On the flight deck, the crew were fresh and alert. They had taken control at the last stopover in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Captain Moody had had his first taste of flying at the age of 16, when he took a gliding lesson. He was one of the first pilots ever trained on the Boeing 747. First officer Roger Greaves had been a co-pilot for more than six years, and Barry Townley-Freeman was flight engineer.

As the jet flew over the Indonesian city of Jakarta, it was cruising at more than 36,000ft and had been in the air for an hour-and-a-half. Expecting an easy flight, Captain Moody checked his weather radar, which showed smooth sailing for the next 300 miles.

Assured that all was well, he asked Greaves to take charge while he took a break and stretched his legs.

In the cabin, chief steward Graham Skinner had observed excessive smoke in the air. Back in 1982, it was still legal to smoke on jets, and he was concerned it may have been a smouldering cigarette.

In the cockpit, the flight took an unsettling turn. First Officer Greaves said: 'Barry and I were just sitting there minding the shop, pitch dark night, of course, and then we started to get these pinpricks of light on the windscreen.'

His engineer, Townley-Freeman, asked whether it could be St Elmo's Fire - a natural phenomenon sometimes seen when planes fly through highly charged electric thunderclouds. The only thing was, there were no thunderclouds that night. The radar showed a clear sky.

Alarmed by this turn of events, the two men were further disturbed to see, with the help of their landing lights, a thin layer of cloud surrounding their plane.

Back in the cabin, a shudder of turbulence shook passengers as they slept. Breaking off from her book, Betty Tootell glanced to her left, where she had a clear view of the port wing. 'To my surprise, it was covered in a brilliant, shimmering light,' she recalls.

'I carried on reading, but I found that I kept reading the same paragraph over and over. I then noticed that thick smoke was pouring into the cabin through the vents above the windows. I didn't know what was happening.'

Neither did the crew. They decided it was time to call their captain back to the controls. 'The smoke filling the plane smelt like a sulphuric, electrical smell,' recalls Moody. 'I went on the flight deck expecting to hear that we had some electrical smoke from the aircraft.'

Suddenly, Greaves said: 'Oh my Lord. Look at engine four! It's lit up somehow.' The captain was distracted, however: he had just noticed that the engine on his side was illuminated.

Ahead of them, they appeared to be flying into a sheet of brilliant white light, and the temperature within the aircraft began to soar.

Twenty-five years on, Skinner describes the scene: 'It got really, really hot,' he says. 'You were perspiring, drenched in sweat. The acrid smoke filling the cabin was at the back of your throat, up your nose, in your eyes - your eyes were running.'

Most of the passengers now realised that this was no regular flight. Charles Capewell told his young sons to close the blind on his porthole, and affected an air of calm as his blood ran cold.

He says: 'As young as they were, they knew we were in bad, bad trouble and they looked at me as if to say: "Well, what do we do now, Dad?"'

In the absence of an explanation, the cabin crew stowed away loose items in a bustle of efficiency, offering blind reassurance to passengers in an attempt to stop the air of latent panic igniting. Chief steward Skinner explains: 'If I was misleading them, then that was for a reason, because I didn't want them to get as upset as I felt.

'I just couldn't believe what was happening, and yet I was chatting to the passengers, saying: "Nothing to worry about. It's just a little hiccup."'

By now, the passengers could see the extent of the problem with their own eyes, however. Betty Tootell says: 'There were huge flames coming out of all four engines. You were plagued by questions: Are we going to burn to death? Are we going to choke to death on the smoke? What's causing it? What are they going to do about it?'

As the fire engulfed the engines, one of them revved loudly and failed. Recalling the drill he was taught as a young pilot, Captain Moody began to shut it down. Next, engine two failed. Then the unthinkable happened. The engineer delivered the death knell: all four engines had failed.

In the cabin, the most ominous sound of all filled the air: a rumbling, grating noise almost like a cement mixer, followed by total silence. Flight 009 had entered that nameless void. It was falling from the sky.

Passenger Charles Capewell says: 'The quietness was unbelievable. It seemed eerie and surreal, as if we were suspended in space. All we could feel was this quietness and the whimpering from the few people who were really upset.'

So what passes through the human mind as you stare death in the face? The passengers of Flight 009 offer a unique glimpse.

Tootell, who has written a book, All Four Engines Have Failed, on passengers' response to their neardeath experiences, recalls: 'The atmosphere in the cabin was very tense and very quiet. At first, it was raw fear and disbelief, and then after a while it turned to acceptance. We knew we were going to die.'

In the cockpit, the crew fought to control the giant glider that the 747 had become. Greaves radioed a Mayday warning to Jakarta control. Initially, they failed to understand the message - seemingly unable to comprehend such a catastrophe.

He repeated the warning, in the international format drilled into every flight crew: 'Mayday, Mayday. Jakarta control. Speedbird nine. We have lost all four engines. Repeat, all four engines. Now descending through flight level 3-5-0.'

Even without its engines, a 747 can travel forward ten miles for every 1,000ft it falls in altitude. With no power, flight 009 had begun a long, excruciatingly slow fall. The crew realised they had less than half an hour before they hit the sea.

Moody says: 'When all engines stop, you go into automatic mode. Obviously, we had practised this on the simulator many, many times.'

He began the standard engine restart drill, and decided to turn the crippled craft back towards the closest airport, just outside Jakarta - but a quick calculation told him that they would not make it without at least one functioning engine. As pressure within the cabin fell, oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling - an automatic emergency measure to make up for the lack of air. But some did not work.

Moody took drastic action: to prevent his passengers dying of oxygen starvation, he went into a nosedive, dropping 6,000ft in one minute, to an altitude where there was enough oxygen in the outside atmosphere to fill the cabin once more.

And quite unexpectedly, this action almost certainly saved the lives of every person on board.

Suddenly, engine four roared back into life. As the plane fell past 13,000ft, another engine came back into action, followed by the other two. The crew were euphoric, though when one of the four engines failed again, their fears continued.

With three engines operational, the plane closed in on the airport. But its problems were far from over.

Moody could see nothing outside - the windshield glass had been damaged. Landing equipment on the ground which could help them was not working, and the crew had to land the plane manually. With consummate skill, the pilot guided the aircraft to a perfect landing. 'The airplane seemed to kiss the earth,' recalls Moody. 'It was beautiful.'

Safely on the ground, passengers hugged each other and applauded the crew. But what had happened? How had all four engines failed?

The result of a forensic investigation into the incident was to change pilot training around the world. Engineers at Rolls-Royce found that the engines had seized up because the plane had flown through a cloud of volcanic ash.

There had been an eruption of the Mount Galunggung volcano southeast of Jakarta that day. Wind had blown a cloud of ash into the path of the plane and the finely ground particles of rock had sandblasted the aircraft and choked its engines.

The volcanic cloud did not show up on the radar because it was composed of very dry material, unlike weather systems which are detected by their water particles.

By dropping into clear, denser air, the crew's efforts to restart the engines paid off, as the volcanic material was blown free.

Tom Casadevall, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, says: 'We've incorporated this learning into training. Pilots now know to look for signs including the odour of sulphur in the cabin and frictional electrification on the leading edges.'

In the months following their brush with death, the crew of flight BA 009 were showered with awards and commendations. With passengers, they formed the Galunggung gliding club, which enables survivors to stay in touch to this day.

And there was one happy postscript. Now 81, Betty Tootell went on to marry James Ferguson, the man who sat in the row in front of her.

'Life is full of surprises,' she says, from her home near Auckland, New Zealand. 'James and I married 13 years ago and we feel we're still on honeymoon. That night, I learned to count every day as a bonus.'