Every single day over 100.000 flights take place between cities all over the world. Flying is by far the safest form of transportation in the world, but when things do go wrong the consequences are very severe.
If you're driving your car to work and you run out of fuel, you can just pull over and walk over to the nearest gas station. But if you run out of fuel while in mid-air, you've got a very serious problem and you're options will be equally limited!
This is exactly what happened to Air Canada flight 143, on July 3rd 1983.
The day before the accident, the plane was flown from Toronto to Edmonton, and received its routine maintenance checks. The next morning the plane was flown to Montreal where it picked up its new crew for the next flight from Montreal back to Edmonton.
The captain on board was Robert Pearson, a pilot with over 15.000 flight hours, and first officer Maurice Quintal who had more than 7000 flight hours.
At the time the accident happened Air Canada was in the process of transitioning from Imperial units, which is currently only used by three countries in the world, over to metric which is used by every other country.
Air Canada was also transitioning over to the metric system, but had only begun to do so on their on their brand new Boeing 767 aircraft, which of course Air Canada flight 143 was one of.
And this caused some confusion for the refueling team, who had been instructed to load up the plane with 22.300 kilos of fuel. Unfortunately they filled up the plane with only 22.300 pounds of fuel instead. This was only enough for about half of their flight back to Edmonton.
The flight crew approved the refueling without noticing the error, and took off. They didn't know that anything was wrong until an alarm went off, telling them that the left engine had stopped working.
They were only half way through their trip, and with only one engine left working, they decided to divert to nearby Winnipeg for an emergency landing.
Unfortunately for them, not long after the left engine had stopped working, the second engine also stopped. And this caused a complete loss of power to the entire plane. This shut off all the lights in the cabin, and turned off most of the instrument panels inside of the cockpit.
The pilots were now responsible for finding a way to land safely, without any engines and with only very basic instruments. On top of that they were quickly running out of time, before the plane would fall out of the sky!
The pilots went through their checklist and searched for the chapter on flying without any engines, but they quickly found out that this section didn't exist! This situation had never been covered in any of their training, and Air Canada had just assumed that a situation like this would just never happen.
Fortunately captain Pearson was also an experienced glider pilot, and prepared the aircraft for a glider landing. But without a working vertical speed indicator, they had no idea how fast they were descending, and they also didn't know how much time they had left.
The pilots did their best to calculate how far they could glide, and if they could still land in Winnipeg. But they quickly came to the conclusion that this was now impossible.
First officer Quintal came up with the idea of attempting to land at the decommissioned former Canadian Air Force base at Gimli. Everybody agreed on the plan, but unbeknownst to them the former base had been converted into a race track, and at the time of the crisis was being used for a race.
As they got closer to the runway, they manually lowered their landing gear by using gravity, and they realized that they were coming in too high and too fast! But since they had no choice, they continued anyway.
Meanwhile on the ground, nobody had any clue that a plane was about to land, as the aircraft wasn't generating any noise.
At the same time the front landing gear had failed to lock into place. But this actually ended up being a good thing.
As soon as the plane made contact with the runway, the captain braked hard and this forced the front gear back inside. The front of the plane was now grinding on the ground, and this slowed it down faster and prevented it from veering off into the crowds surrounding the plane on either side.
Flight 143 eventually came to a safe stop on the runway without any loss of life, just 17 minutes after their emergency had started!
In the end the pilots were actually demoted for allowing the accident to happen in the first place, but they successfully appealed their suspensions and were awarded the first ever diploma for outstanding airmanship.
They both continued to work as pilots for the rest of their careers without any other incident taking place.
The 767 involved in the accident also returned to service and was retired back in 2008.
At the very least this accident helped make flying even safer, and luckily no one was hurt in the incident!
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this story!