>Volcano erupts in Indonesia
>Locals don’t notice because they have shit weather radar
>747 flies through the dust cloud
>All 4 engines get filled with volcanic ash and burn out
>“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 them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.”
>Spend 12 minutes gliding, dropping 23,500 feet in the process
>The pilots are preparing to be the first 747 ever to attempt a water landing
>Finally one of the engines restarts
>But ILS is offline
>Windscreen is completely opaque due to ash, no way to clean it
>Manage to land running entirely on instruments
>Fatalities: 0
>Injuries: 0
Survivors: 263
And that’s how pilots learned to never fly around an erupting volcano and several years back all air traffic in Europe was halted when a volcano with an unpronounceable name in Iceland had a bad moment.
Hey, it is easy to spell how Icelanders pronounce it in my native language:
Eyyafyatlayakötül
Or a cognate, Eyfallicle; ey as in island, fall as in a valley(?), icle from icicle.
Mér líkar þetta málið!
Islandmountainglacier. Got it. Why didn’t they say that in the first place?
That was shortly after their economy crashed. I remember people saying that the last wish of Iceland’s economy was to have its ashes spread across Europe.