British Airways Flight 009
1982 aviation incident over the Indian Ocean, south of Java
British Airways Flight 009, sometimes referred to by its callsign SPEEDBIRD 9 or as the Jakarta incident, was a scheduled British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Auckland, with stops in Bombay, Kuala Lumpur, Perth and Melbourne.
On 24 June 1982, the route was flown by City of Edinburgh, a Boeing 747-236B registered as G-BDXH. The aircraft flew into a cloud of volcanic ash thrown up by the eruption of Mount Galunggung around 110 miles (180 km) south-east of Jakarta, Indonesia, resulting in the failure of all four engines. Partly because the event occurred at night, obscuring the cloud, and partly because volcanic ashes were not recognized as a risk for jets at that time, the reason for the failure was not immediately apparent to the crew or air traffic control. The aircraft was diverted to Jakarta in the hope that enough engines could be restarted to allow it to land there. It glided out of the ash cloud, and all engines were restarted (although engine number 2 started vibrating and the crew had to shut it down soon after), allowing the aircraft to land safely at Halim Perdanakusuma International Airport in Jakarta.
The crew members of the accident segment had boarded the aircraft in Kuala Lumpur, while many of the passengers had been aboard since the flight began in London.
Incident
At the time of the incident, the flight crew of BA009 consisted of 41-year-old Captain Eric Henry Moody, 32-year-old Senior First Officer Roger Greaves, and 40-year-old Senior Engineer Officer Barry Townley-Freeman. The flight crew members had boarded the aircraft at Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport in Kuala Lumpur and were due to pilot the 747-200 for the Kuala Lumpur-to-Perth leg.
Shortly after contacting the Air Traffic Control at Halim Airport in Jakarta at around 13:40 UTC (20:40 Jakarta time) above the Indian Ocean, south of Java, the crew first noticed an unusual effect on the windscreen similar to St. Elmo's fire, while Moody was heading to the lavatory.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q435605. Authority coordinates are -7.257, 108.077. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “British Airways Flight 009” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.