The weather radar showed two intense storm cells ahead, with what appeared to be a gap between them. Captain Rozaq, a 44-year-old veteran with over 14,000 flight hours, aimed for the gap. It was a trap -- or rather, a trick of physics. The precipitation between the cells was so dense that it attenuated the radar signals, absorbing the energy that should have bounced back as a warning. On the screen, the most dangerous corridor looked like the safest one. The 737 entered a thunderstorm of extraordinary violence. Hail battered the nose radome. Rain poured into the engines at a volume that exceeded their designed tolerance. At flight idle -- a low-power setting used during descent -- the CFM56 turbofans could not digest the water fast enough. Both flamed out. The cockpit went dark. Without engine-driven generators, the aircraft had only its backup battery for electrical power. That battery, investigators would later discover, had been holding just 22 volts instead of the required 24 -- weakened by inadequate maintenance long before the flight departed.

Gunawan, the 46-year-old first officer, tried to radio a Mayday call. Nothing went out -- the battery could not power the transmitter. Rozaq attempted to restart the engines, cycling through the ignition sequence two or three times. Boeing's own manual recommended starting the auxiliary power unit first, since the APU could provide far more electrical power for engine restart than the battery alone. But the crew tried the engines directly, and Boeing's guidance also warned that in severe rain, engines could take up to three minutes to spool back to idle. The pilots allowed roughly one minute before each retry, draining what little charge remained in the already-compromised battery. When they finally turned to the APU as a last resort, the battery was spent. Total electrical failure followed. The aircraft was now a 33-ton glider descending through cloud at roughly 3,000 feet per minute, with no instruments, no communications, and no way to restart anything.

They broke through the clouds at about 8,000 feet and saw Central Java spread below them -- rice paddies, villages, roads, and threading through the lowlands, the wide brown ribbon of the Bengawan Solo River. Indonesia's longest river on Java, the Bengawan Solo runs shallow in many stretches, its sandy bed rarely more than a few feet beneath the surface. Rozaq chose it. With no hydraulic power for flaps and no way to lower the landing gear, he lined the 737 up with the river and brought it down belly-first. The aircraft struck the water nose-high, the tail absorbing the worst of the impact. The fuselage held. The wings stayed attached. There was no fire -- a small miracle in itself, given the fuel still aboard. The 737 settled into the shallow riverbed with its structure largely intact, a controlled crash that the investigation would later acknowledge as skillful airmanship under impossible conditions.

Only two of the aircraft's doors could be opened. Villagers from nearby Serenan arrived before any rescue team did, wading into the river to help passengers out of the broken fuselage. They carried the injured to the nearest clinic using whatever vehicles they could find. Uninjured survivors and their belongings were sheltered in an empty house while they waited. The scene behind the aircraft was grimmer. The tail impact had ripped away a section of cabin floor near the rear, ejecting two flight attendants into the river. Both were found downstream with severe injuries. One of them, a young crew member seated at the aft station, did not survive -- the sole fatality among sixty people aboard. Captain Rozaq, once on the ground, contacted Yogyakarta's air traffic control tower by cellphone. The official rescue team arrived two hours later. Garuda Indonesia subsequently funded road construction near the crash site and built a multipurpose hall and reservoir for the village, acknowledging that the community's response had been faster and more effective than any institutional one.

The Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee and the U.S. NTSB pieced together a chain of failures that began long before the storm. The battery's degraded state meant the crew never had a realistic chance of restarting anything once both engines quit. Pilot training on weather radar interpretation had been informal -- conducted only during flight training, with no recurrent instruction on how dense precipitation could create false safe corridors on the display. Had the crew tilted their radar to sweep the ground during descent, they might have recognized the danger. The NTSB recommended that the FAA advise pilots to maintain higher engine power in severe precipitation, since flight idle left the engines vulnerable to water ingestion at volumes they could otherwise have handled. Captain Rozaq went on flying for Garuda Indonesia for nearly two decades after the ditching. In 2018, he survived the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Palu in Central Sulawesi. He retired in 2020 when the pandemic grounded much of the aviation industry -- a man who had outlasted a river landing, a natural disaster, and a global crisis, each time walking away.