In 1983, two pilots miraculously landed a jumbo jet with no fuel from 40,000 feet
With no casualties, the ‘Gimli Glider’ was a feat of flying
On a gentle summer evening in 1983, two boys were riding bikes in rural Canada when a jumbo jet came out of the sky at 200 miles an hour.
At 40,000 feet, the plane’s engines had failed 17 minutes earlier. But on the ground, a crowd of sports car enthusiasts were having a post-race barbecue on the airstrip where the pilots intended to land. With its front landing gear disabled, the Air Canada Boeing 767 slammed into the runway, casting behind it a stream of sparks the length of a football field. The crowd scattered to safer ground. From the cockpit, captain Bob Pearson could see the petrified faces of the two boys as they fled.
Whether they had time to glean it or not, the crowd of drag-race enthusiasts was escaping the trajectory of the jet as it attempted an emergency landing, using a stretch of racetrack as an improvised runway. A series of improbable conditions and mishaps led to this moment, each of which contributed to a singular nightmare: a commercial jet having run out of fuel with 69 people on board.
The plane was brand new, and came with some novel glitches in its computer-based fuel-measurement system—not to mention a processor disconnected due to improper soldering. Canada’s recent pivot from the imperial to the metric system didn’t help either. The 767 was among the first aircraft in Air Canada’s fleet to abide by the new metric measurements, and the formula pre-flight engineers used to manually account for the fuel load solved not for kilograms but for the more diminutive pound. These problems, plus a broken chain of communication, caused two experienced Air Canada pilots to leave the ground with only 9,144 of the requisite 20,400 kilograms of fuel, less than half of what they would need to fly the scheduled 2,100 miles from Montreal to Edmonton.
Shortly after dinner on July 23, 1983, a light in the cockpit of Air Canada Flight 143 alerted pilots Bob Pearson and Maurice Quintal of a fuel-pressure problem. Having punched in the same faulty fuel calculations as the engineers on the ground, the pair suspected the cause was a failing fuel pump, in which case gravity would circulate the fuel regardless. Then a second light came on. Rick Dion, a maintenance engineer for Air Canada, was on the flight and happened to be in the cockpit at the time. He agreed with the pilots that it was best to be safe and heed the warnings. Captain Pearson called into air traffic control to make way for an emergency landing in Winnipeg.
Not long after that, the plane’s left engine puttered out. The pilots began to gear up for a one-engine landing, a difficult maneuver, but one that Pearson had trained for in flight simulators. But minutes later, the second engine failed, and the controls in the cockpit went dark. “Oh, fuck,” said Pearson, according to the in-flight recorder. The $40 million, cutting-edge plane had become a great metal glider, descending at a rate of 2,500 feet per minute.
Upon hearing the news, air traffic controllers began fearing the worst, and worried that too severe a turn might knock the jet off its optimal aerodynamic course, sending it into a spiral. There was no training, no protocol for landing under these circumstances.
With the engines gone, so was the plane’s main source of electricity. The crew was forced to rely on a small but possibly sufficient backup: the ram-air turbine, which, deployed from the belly of the fuselage, generated electricity as its blades spun from the incoming stream of air. This permitted the pilots to have some control over the flaps and ailerons, which were essential in steering the plane.
The pilots also lost the function of the plane’s transponder, responsible for relaying to air traffic control the craft’s location. So, controllers resorted to old-fashioned radar, which was less precise. But it was essential for guiding the pilots on course to Winnipeg where they could land and receive emergency assistance on the ground
The flight attendants and passengers were not told that the plane was gliding without engine power, only that an emergency landing was imminent. Some passengers began writing notes to their loved ones or modifying their wills. Passenger Bryce Bell, comprehending the need for a quick and intelligent response, began to regret the two in-flight drinks he had recently enjoyed.
As copilot Maurice Quintal began to calculate their rate of descent and the distance to Winnipeg, he realized that the plane would come up some 15 miles short of the runway. Though it would mean forgoing reliable emergency assistance, Quintal urged Pearson their best hope was a nearby runway in the town of Gimli, which Quintal was familiar with from his time training in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Pearson trusted his copilot, and turned north. As the gliding aircraft gained on the runway, the pair discovered they were too high, and they risked overshooting the landing strip. Quintal also discovered that his old training runway had been in part converted into a drag-racing track, with scores of people on the ground below. With it being too risky to either point the plane higher or lower, Pearson put the plane on a tilted slide, allowing the craft to quickly shed altitude while adding little to its forward velocity.
When the plane finally hit ground, passengers were greeted by a loud bang similar to a shotgun blast. Two tires on the main landing gear burst upon impact. As weight shifted to the front of the plane, the unlocked nose gear was jammed back into its compartment, and the plane bounced forward before grinding along the runway in the direction of families now cooking and socializing after the recently ended drag races. To avoid running over the people and the two boys on bikes, Pearson prepared to turn the plane onto the grass, but it wasn’t necessary: the nose of the plane then hit the center guardrail of the racetrack, sparing the crowd.
Once the plane came to rest, the crew began to herd the passengers through a swift evacuation (just a month and a half earlier, an Air Canada flight made an emergency landing, with 23 people dying as the cabin burst into flames). The plane’s rear was elevated like the upper end of a seesaw, and the evacuation slides were too steep. Ten people received minor injuries on the way down, but these would be the greatest injuries in the whole ordeal.
Members of a sports-car club rushed to the site of the accident with handheld fire extinguishers and helped put out a small fire toward the front of the plane. With that out of the way, pilots Pearson and Quintal had landed an engineless plane with no fatalities.
The incident attracted international attention and the plane was dubbed the “Gimli Glider.” It was repaired and continued to be part of Air Canada’s fleet until 2008, when it was retired. Though temporarily suspended after the incident, both pilots continued to work for Air Canada, and 25 years later, the pair was honored with a parade in the very town where they defied the odds.
