There's a few bits that need adding to the awesomeness of this story:
1. There exists a club, started by Captain Moody, called the Gallunggung Gliders Club.
Everyone on the plane is a member. They are still in contact.
2. This flight held the record for the longest ever unpowered glide in a commercial air liner for just short of 13 months. The Gimli Glider beat it on 23 July 1983 (Air Canada flight 143, which famously ran out of fuel due to a metric/imperial conversation error).
3. A lot of the height lost in the glide was actually done on purpose. The first officer's oxygen mask wasn't functional, and Captain Moody decided he would rather have his entire flight crew available to problem solve, so they did an emergency descent to breathable air rather than sacrifice the FO to hypoxia and retain height.
They knew this was problematic, because of the mountains - if they couldn't get at least 2 engines lit, they had no chance of making a landing (hence the preparation for ditching). But it was very likely the right call as the FO worked diligently with the flight engineer to get the engines running.
4. The electro-magnetic interference caused by the volcanic dust messed with their radios, and it took them a long time, and help from another plane, to get Air Traffic Control to understand what was happening. ATC thought it was just a single engine failure for a long time, and wondered what all the fuss was about.
5. When they managed to get power back, and turned around, they flew back into the dust cloud. They had engine failures again, radio issues, static effects on the windshield... They quickly decided "fuck that" and descended to clear air. They had to fly almost dangerously low the whole way back to Jakarta. And then put the thing down while blind.
6. Even though it was the first time the dangers of volcanic ash clouds came into the awareness of the international flying community, LOADS of pilots and engineers in Jakarta took one look at the sandblasted plane and correctly identified what had happened.
(sadly not the last time teachable incidents that didn't occur in Europe or North America were ignored by Europe and North America and it bit people in the ass...)
