Remembering the Gimli Glider

On July 23, 1983, Air Canada Flight 143 took off from Montreal, headed to Edmonton with 69 passengers on board.

All went swimmingly well until the plane passed over Red Lake, Ont. That’s a desolate area, about 300 miles north of Thunder Bay and 60 miles east of the Manitoba border.

The first sign of trouble for Capt. Bob Pearson and his First Officer, Maurice Quental, came when they noticed a flashing light that told them they had a fuel pressure problem in the left engine. Figuring it to be a fuel pump failure, they shut the pump down, reasoning the right engine fuel pump could service both engines.

Which it tried to do. Until the left engine quit. Long story short, the right engine died not long after, leaving the 767 with no power and no instruments. Luckily, Pearson had extensive glider experience.

While Maurice searched for a place to land, Bob glided the plane for 17 minutes before putting it down smoothly at the former Royal Canadian Air Force base at Gimli, Man. Ergo, the name the Gimli Glider.

Turns out the flashing lights were not directed at fuel pump failure. The fuel pumps worked as hard as they could, but the real problem was there was no fuel for the pumps to pump.

This was just as Canada was changing from the imperial system to the metric system and the crew in Montreal calculated the fuel in pounds instead of kilograms and Air Canada Flight 143 simply ran out of gas.

Miraculously, there were only a few minor injuries, caused by the fact that one of the exit slides didn’t deploy properly and didn’t quite reach the ground.

I’m Fred Trainor and that’s a Little Good News.