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It has been almost four decades since an Air Canada Boeing 767 ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet.
With solid piloting and a little bit of luck, the jet landed without any severe injuries to
passengers or crew. The aircraft itself even went on to serve another 25 years with the airline.
Let’s take a look at the story of The Gimli Glider…
On July 23rd, 1983, Air Canada Flight 143 took off from Montreal, and headed towards Edmonton,
via Ottawa. The flight was operated by a five-month-old 767-200 with registration C-GAUN.
On board were 61 passengers and eight crew. At around 8pm local time, while the aircraft
was cruising at 41,000 feet over Red Lake, Ontario, the cockpit crew received a warning
of low fuel pressure in the left fuel pump. The pilots first assumed the fuel pump had
failed and switched off the alarm, as the Flight Management Computer said there should be plenty
of fuel. However, within moments, the right fuel pump alarm also sounded. The crew then decided to
divert the aircraft to Winnipeg, 120 miles away. As they commenced the descent, the left engine
failed in a matter of minutes. No sooner had plans for a one-engine landing been made
than a loud bang could be heard, and the cockpit alarm began blaring, nothing that ‘all
engines were out. The plane had lost all power... As if flying with no engines was not bad enough,
the Boeing 767 was one of the first jets with an electronic flight instrument system powered
by its engines. This meant that when the engines stopped working, all the instruments went dark.
Thankfully, the ram air turbine was enough to power emergency flight instruments sufficient
to land the aircraft. It also provided some hydraulic support for the crew to
be able to maneuver the plane, which was not possible by muscular strength alone.
However, instruments lacked a vertical speed indicator that could have provided an idea
of how far the plane could glide. Former RCAF Station Gimli, an old Air Force Base, was 20 miles
closer to the aircraft’s location than Winnipeg. Flying the jet were Captain Robin ‘Bob’ Pearson
and First Officer Maurice Quintal. Pearson had 15,000 hours of flying time while Quintal had
7,000 hours. As chance would have it, Captain Pearson was also an established glider pilot,
and First Officer Quintal had trained at Gimli while serving in the military.
Even though the decommissioned base had no emergency services,
it was deemed to be the safer option. However, neither of the pilots was aware the base had
been turned into a drag racing track – with a major race scheduled for that very day.
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Thanks for watching!
The two heavy landing gears were dropped and locked into place using gravity, but
the lighter nose gear only extended part-way down. Simultaneously, the crew realized that they were
coming in too quickly and too high towards the ‘runway’. They opted to perform a quote-unquote
side-slip to reduce altitude and speed. The jet touched down within 800 feet of the threshold.
The nose gear gave out immediately as the plane touched down. However,
everyone on board survived. Ten people suffered minor injuries during the evacuation.
Investigators later found that there was only 64 liters of fuel left in the tanks – but no leaks.
The factors that led to this situation are fascinating. First, there were problems with the
plane’s Fuel Quantity Indication System (FQIS). The day before the incident,
an engineer in Edmonton ran a service check on the plane’s F.Q.I.S.,
according to a bulletin issued by Boeing. The system failed, which made the fuel gauges go blank
as a result. The engineer, in lieu of spare parts, fixed the problem by disabling the system’s second
channel and tagging the circuit breaker. He informed the pilot flying out of
Edmonton the next day that the fuel would need to be measured with a floatstick.
However, due to a crew change, the information wasn’t passed on accurately.
The second, more important factor had to do with a change in the units used for measuring fuel. The
plane had just been delivered to Air Canada from Boeing’s Everett facilities four months earlier.
It was the first aircraft in the Air Canada fleet to use kilograms on the fuel gauges,
and the measurements needed to be entered in kilograms per litre. However,
the fueler who checked the floatstick reported the density in pounds per liter, as this was
still the procedure for other Air Canada aircraft. The cockpit crew then entered the value into the
Flight Management Computer without recalculating it for metric values. So instead of tanking the
20,088 liters of fuel required for the return flight to Edmonton, the plane left with just
under 5,000 liters – about half of what was needed to reach their destination. The Captain
repeated the same conversion issues after another floatstick test during the stopover in Ottawa.
Two years after the incident, the pilots were awarded the first-ever Fédération
Aéronautique Internationale Diploma for Outstanding Airmanship.
C-GAUN was patched up in two days and then flew out to Winnipeg for full repairs. It
returned to service with the airline and kept operating until 2008. Iit was then withdrawn
from service and subsequently stored and partially scrapped at Mojave Spaceport.
Did you know about the story of the Gimli Glider? Let us know in the comments.