KLM Flight 867


On 15 December 1989, KLM Flight 867, en route from Amsterdam to Narita International Airport Tokyo, was forced to make an emergency landing at Anchorage International Airport Alaska when all four engines failed. The Boeing 747-400 combi, less than six months old at the time, flew through a thick cloud of volcanic ash from Mount Redoubt, which had erupted the day before.

Engine failure

All four engines failed, leaving only critical systems on backup electrical power. One report assigns the engine shutdown to the turning of the ash into a glass coating inside the engines that fooled the engine temperature sensors and led to an auto-shutdown of all four engines.
When all four main generators shut off due to the failure of all the engines, a momentary power interruption occurs when the flight instruments transfer to standby power. Standby power on the 747-400 is provided by two batteries and inverters. The captain performed the engine restart procedure, which failed on the first few attempts, and repeated it until restart was achieved. On some of the attempts, as one or more engines started to operate, the main generator switched back on. This switching on and off caused repeated power transfer interruptions to the flight instruments. The temporary blanking of the instruments gave the appearance that standby power had failed. These power transfers were later verified from the flight data recorder.

Transcript

The following edited transmissions took place between Anchorage Center, the air traffic control facility for that region, and KLM 867:

Recovery and aftermath

After descending more than 14,000 feet, the crew restarted the engines and safely landed the plane. In this case the ash caused more than US$80 million in damage to the aircraft, requiring all four engines to be replaced, but no lives were lost and no one was injured. A shipment of 25 African birds, two genets, and 25 tortoises aboard the plane was diverted to an Anchorage warehouse, where eight birds and three tortoises died before the mislabeled shipment was discovered.
KLM continues to operate the Amsterdam-Tokyo route, but as Flight 861 and it is now a nonstop eastbound flight using a Boeing 777. Flight 867 is now used for flights between Amsterdam and Osaka.
The aircraft, PH-BFC, remained in service with KLM until its retirement from the fleet on 14 March 2018. It joined the KLM Asia fleet upon the subsidiary's establishment in 1995 until it was returned to KLM in 2012 and repainted in the standard KLM livery after a maintenance check.

Similar incidents

In a nearly identical incident on 24 June 1982, British Airways Flight 9 from London Heathrow to Auckland, while on the leg from Kuala Lumpur to Perth, Western Australia, flew into a cloud of volcanic ash from the eruption of Mount Galunggung, causing all four engines to fail due to compressor stall. The aircraft was diverted to Jakarta, and glided out of the ash cloud, restarted its engines, and landed safely.

Other gliding airliners