this video is made possible by brilliant
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single day over 100,000 flights take
place up in the skies between cities all
across the world right now as you're
watching this video there's probably
about 5,000 or so planes full of people
flying over just the United States alone
flying by airplane is by far the safest
possible way for you to travel anywhere
today in the 21st century but accidents
do still happen sometimes if you're
driving your car on the way to work and
you run out of gas
you may just have to pull over and push
it or hitchhike over to the nearest gas
station but when you run out of gas on
your plane while you're in the middle of
flying it your options are all pretty
much equally [ __ ] and that's exactly the
situation that the crew of Air Canada
flight 143 faced back on July 23rd 1983
the day before their plane was flown
from Toronto to Edmonton and received
its routine maintenance checks on the
morning of the 23rd the plane was flown
from Edmonton over to Montreal where the
old crew got swapped out for our new
crew that takes part in this story
including Captain Robert Pearson with
over 15,000 hours of flight experience
at first officer Maurice can tal with
over 7,000 hours it's important to note
that at the time Canada was in the
middle of converting from barbarian
imperial units over to the glorious
metric system for their aviation
industry but Air Canada had so far only
began using the metric system on their
brand-new 767 planes which of course Air
Canada flight 143 was one of every other
plane besides the 767 s in the Air
Canada fleet were still using imperial
units and this caused a bit of confusion
on the part of the refueling team who
were instructed to load up the plane
with twenty two thousand three hundred
kilograms of fuel unfortunately they
filled up the plane with twenty two
thousand three hundred pounds of fuel
instead which was only about half of the
fuel that they needed to reach Edmonton
the flight crew approved of the fuel
without noticing the air took off and
didn't even think about it until they
were forty-one thousand feet high up in
the air and an alarm went off signaling
that their left engine had quit working
they were only about halfway through
their trip to Edmonton and with
one engine working they decided to
divert to nearby Winnipeg for an
emergency landing
unfortunately for them though quickly
after the left engine went out the right
engine followed suit and died as well
this was of course because their plane
had run out of fuel forty-one thousand
feet high up in the sky and with the
loss of power to the engines came a loss
in electricity for the entire plane
which shut off most of the instrument
panels inside of the pilots cockpit
captain Pearson and first officer contol
were now responsible for somehow getting
all 61 of their passengers and crew on
board to safety without any fuel and
with only very basic instruments and
they knew that they didn't have much
time the first thing they did was to
frantically search through their onboard
emergency checklist for the section
about flying a plane with both engines
out but they quickly discovered that
that section just didn't exist this
situation had never been covered before
in their flight simulator training and
Air Canada corporate had just assumed
that an incident like this would never
happen so nobody was really prepared for
it
luckily for everybody on board captain
Pearson also just happened to be an
experienced glider pilot and decided to
do the only logical thing glide the
plane down to a super serious emergency
landing somewhere unfortunately for
everybody on board
neither of the pilots had access to a
vertical speed indicator which indicates
the rate at which the aircraft is
descending this meant that the pilots
didn't know with certainty how long they
could continue biting for a fourth plane
inevitably smashed into the ground
captain Pearson made his best guess as
to what the optimal gliding speed for
the plane was around 250 miles per hour
at first officer contol
began frantically calculating if they
could still reach their intended
emergency landing spot at Winnipeg using
the mechanical backup instruments on
board to figure out their altitude and
measuring that against the distance
traveled that they were traveling
provided by air traffic control and he
figured out that they had dropped five
thousand feet in altitude in only ten
nautical miles of gliding which meant
that Winnipeg was too far away
thinking quickly contol suggested that
they land at an old decommissioned Royal
Canadian Air Force Base at Gimli where
he used to serve as a pilot captain
Pearson and air traffic control all
agreed on the plan but unknown
to all of them the former Air Force Base
had since been converted into a
racetrack and at the time of their
crisis a race was in the middle of being
hosted there and part of the
decommissioned runway was being used as
a drag strip as they were getting close
to the old runway that's now a drag
strip
they used a gravity drop to force the
landing gear down without using any
power it became apparent that they were
coming in too high and too fast but they
decided that they had no other choice
and they surged ahead anyway there were
a few things that made their landing
extremely difficult though first without
any engines working their plane was
making almost no noise and so people on
the ground at the racetrack had no
warning of their sudden landing second
their nose wheel had failed to lock into
place during the gravity drop and third
the plane had automatically deployed a
wind turbine on the side of the plane to
provide power for the hydraulic steering
system since the main engines were dead
as long as wind was blowing and causing
the turbine blades to spin they had good
ability to steer but as they slowed down
on their approach the blades on the
turbine span slower which generated less
power which caused the plane to be
increasingly more difficult to steer and
control the slower that they went but to
almost miraculous other things happened
that saved them from disaster
first was the nosewheel actually failing
to lock into position as soon as the
wheels of the plane touched down on the
runway captain Pearson braked really
hard and the nose wheel collapsed and
was forced back up into its well that
caused the nose of the aircraft to smash
into the ground bounce back up and then
finally scrape across the ground the
added friction of this helped to slow
the airplane down even more and kept it
from veering off into the crowd
surrounding the plane on either side
Pearson also applied an extra right
brake which caused the main landing gear
to straddle a guardrail that had been
placed in the center of the runway which
created even more extra drag finally Air
Canada flight 143 safely came to a
complete stop on the ground 17 minutes
after they first lost their fuel and had
their engines shut down nobody on board
the plane or on the ground was seriously
injured and following an internal
investigation by Air Canada
captain Pearson was demoted for six
months and first officer kintel was
suspended for two
weeks for allowing the whole thing to
happen in the first place however they
did successfully appeal their
suspensions and they were awarded the
first ever diploma for outstanding
airmanship by the FAI because of the
incident
they both continued to work as pilots
for the rest of their careers without
another major incident taking place and
the 767 plane itself continued in
service for Air Canada until it was
finally retired in 2008 almost 25 years
later the lesson from the whole story is
is that bad math can kill you but good
math afterwards can still save you
basically if everybody just knew how to
use conversions and math properly
beforehand this entire thing would never
have happened in the first place
unfortunately for them the internet and
brilliant didn't exist back then to
teach them these skills but luckily for
you today
brilliant makes learning math easy and
fun if you want to understand more about
things like algebra geometry or calculus
that were important in this scenario the
best way to learn and to understand is
by applying them yourself
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the archive thank you for watching and
I'll see you next week for another
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