In 1979 Canada finally broke ranks with her neighbor to the south and switched from using imperial to metric measurements. While Canadians struggled with kilograms, meters, and liters, Air Canada continued much as it always had. As long as the airline’s fleet of aircraft had tanks and gauges giving measurements in pounds and gallons, those were the units Air Canada continued to use. But four years after the country had made the switch, Air Canada took delivery of its first new state-of-the-art Boeing 767s. The big twinjets used metric measurements, and that meant a good deal of calculation, checking, and double-checking each time they were refueled by ground crew unfamiliar with the new system. But on July 23, 1983, none of that prevented them from getting it badly wrong.
A series of assumptions, minor mechanical faults, duff procedures, and confusion over metric and imperial measurements saw Air Canada Flight 143, en route to Edmonton from Ottawa, suck her tanks dry at 41,000 feet over Red Lake, Ontario. In the cockpit of the 767, Captain Bob Pearson and First Officer Maurice Quintal heard a sharp electronic “bong” indicating that they’d suffered the complete loss of both engines. Starved of fuel, they simply snuffed out. Without power, the electronic flight instruments were next to quit. Pearson and Quintal were at the controls of a 143-ton glider. Behind them were sixty-one passengers.
While Pearson established the big airliner in what he estimated was its best glide, his first officer looked through the manuals for procedures. There were none. Fuel starvation and a complete loss of power weren’t a scenario that Boeing had anticipated. Instead, Quintal began calculating their glide path to Winnipeg, the nearest airfield with the facilities to deal with a crash landing. He checked his calculations twice. They were losing 5,000 feet of altitude every 10 miles.
“We’re not going to make Winnipeg,” he told Pearson. Carry on as they were and they’d hit the ground 12 miles short of the runway threshold. That left just one other possibility.
The Winnipeg Sports Car Club was enjoying a “Family Day” at Gimli. There was go-kart racing and a drag strip. Spectators’ own cars also lined the disused runways. It had been twelve years since the airfield had last played host to Royal Canadian Air Force jets. Now there was just general aviation, little puddle-jumpers, such as Cessnas and Pipers, that were able to fly from the reduced space not used by the petrolheads.
Each one of the go-karts on the Gimli starting grid has more fuel in its tanks than the Boeing 767 that performed an emergency landing behind them.
It was certainly no longer a safe place to land an airliner, and there was no mention of it in Flight 143’s documentation. But Maurice Quintal had been stationed there when he was in the air force and knew the layout of the base. Pearson pointed the nose of the 767 toward the old airfield, just 12 miles north of their position. Gimli or bust.
Quintal dropped the landing gear. With enough power from an auxiliary turbine just to power the flight controls, he was forced to rely on gravity to lower the wheels. Only the main gear under the wings locked into place.
Worse, as they settled into their final approach toward what was left of Gimli’s old Runway 32L, Pearson realized they were too high. Without power to lower the flaps they were coming in fast. Unless they could bleed off some height there was a danger they’d overshoot the runway altogether. Just as Quintal’s particular experience had come into play earlier, now so too did Pearson’s. The 767 captain was a gliding enthusiast, familiar with how to dump altitude and speed to make a landing. He crossed the controls, rolling the stick to the left and kicking the rudder to the right to twist the big jet into an awkward sideslip. Her nose now pointing off to the right of the runway, Flight 143 was crabbing her way in. Pearson held her there until the last possible moment, when he let the nose point forward again to touch down. He jumped on the brakes. Two tires exploded almost immediately. When the nose came down, the unlocked nose gear collapsed, leaving the front of the jet’s fuselage to scrape down the runway throwing up a rooster tail of hot sparks, but it helped slow the runaway plane. Flight 143 came to a smoking halt barely 100 feet from a collection of racegoers turning steaks on their barbecues. Car enthusiasts converged on the airliner to smother the smoldering nose with small fire extinguishers as the jet’s passengers spilled out down inflatable slides to the ground.
Everybody on board Flight 143 survived, although a handful suffered minor injuries as they escaped the aircraft. Such was the skill with which Pearson carried out his deadstick landing, the aircraft herself was repaired and flown out of Gimli. She flew with Air Canada for another twenty-five years until her retirement in 2008.
And in the aftermath of the incident, other Air Canada crews attempted to replicate Pearson and Quintal’s safe landing of the Gimli Glider in the simulator. The result was several simulated crashes.