For the next 13 minutes, pilot Eric Moody desperately attempted to restart its engines, as oxygen masks dropped from bulkheads and burning fumes filled the craft. Finally, an engine sparked into life, halting the plunge of the crippled plane, which Moody managed to turn towards Jakarta, although his sandblasted windscreen - by now almost opaque - meant he had to peer out of a side window to land.
Flight BA 009 had only narrowly survived a passage through a mammoth dust cloud that had just been blasted from Mount Galunggung in Java. Twenty years later, volcanic eruptions remain one of the worst threats to aviation.
But such dangers could soon be eradicated - as a result of a unique European satellite that will not only revolutionise airline safety but also transform disaster warning and weather forecasting in Europe and Africa. The craft, MSG-1 (Meteosat Second Generation), will hover in space above the Equator, taking infrared and other images of Earth every 15 minutes. Using special infra-red detectors, volcanic eruptions will be spotted almost instantly, along with developing thunderstorms, fog banks and floodwaters.
In addition, the probe, to be launched next week, will carry a search-and-rescue transponder.
'At present, transponders are fitted to satellites that sweep over the poles and pass a given area only twice a day,' said Mike Phillips, of Eumetsat, the satellite's developer. 'Ours will give round-the-clock coverage for the first time.'
The probe - a giant, silvery-blue drum - will be the first of a fleet of three craft that will replace Europe's existing Meteosat satellites and which will ultimately cost £1 billion to develop and operate (of which Britain will pay £120 million). Current Meteosat craft take photographs on three different radiation channels or wavelengths every 30 minutes. The new satellites will take scans, in greatly improved detail, every 15 minutes in a total of 12 different wavelengths.
By skilfully combining data from these different scanners, forecasters will then be able to monitor the atmosphere at different heights. In the case of volcanic plumes, the different scanners will allow scientists to tell, instantly, whether they are watching the behaviour of a normal cloud or the emergence of one of burning ash.
As UK meteorologist Sarah Watkin says: 'Volcanic ash clouds rise rapidly, and cause jet engines to fail, but they cannot be detected beforehand by on-board radar. That makes them very dangerous indeed, and makes this satellite an important aid to air safety.'
Similarly, the behaviour of ozone in the stratosphere will be revealed by the satellite's special scanners, while it should also be possible to watch ice building up inside clouds and thunderstorms as they gather over particular areas.
Local councils will get better warning about when to grit roads or to issue flooding warnings, with benefits that could run to billions of pounds a year. 'We can currently forecast the weather accurately a week in advance,' said Eumetsat's director-general, Tillmann Mohr. 'Machines like MSG-1 will help to bring us that closer to three weeks, the upper theoretical limit of weather forecasting. Then we should be able to add weeks to growing seasons, by giving advanced frost warning, for example. Similarly, we should be able to save billions by preventing the sort of flooding that has swept Europe over the past few days.
'In fact, the real issue is not going to be weather forecasting accuracy, but the way that we respond to those forecasts and how hard we listen to the warnings of the meteorologists,' he said.
This last point will be richly appreciated by Captain Moody, who is to be the guest of honour at the satellite's launch party at Eumetsat's headquarters in Darmstadt , Germany, on 27 August.
'When it comes to volcanic eruptions, airlines still don't appreciate the dangers. After what happened to me, I never took a plane near an active volcano, though flights still do approach them. For instance, after Mount Pinatubo started erupting in 1991, there were 14 serious incidents involving planes flying through plumes, costing millions of pounds of damage to aircraft. Who knows how many flights have been lost after flying through sudden new eruptions?
'If we had crashed, the wreckage of our plane would never have been recovered and the whole thing would have been written off as pilot error. This satellite should help stop that sort of thing.'