this is somehow starting to make the rounds so because i am a pedant i am going to take this time to talk a little more in depth about air canada 143, the GIMLI GLIDER
so you may be wondering: how the hell does a 737 (capacity of roughly 100-120 people) run out of fuel midair? the METRIC SYSTEM, that's how!
up until the early eighties, airplanes would have three people in the cockpit: the pilot, first officer, and flight engineer. generally speaking, the pilot's job is to fly the airplane; the first officer's job is to provide support, monitor instruments, and assist (the pilot and FO will swap roles periodically), and the flight engineer's job was to watch over all the fuel gauges, electrical systems, hydraulics, etc., to make sure they were all working properly, as well as taking charge of things like "setting engine power."
however, in the early 1980s -- when this story takes place -- the flight engineer role began to be made obsolete as computers and more advanced systems became capable of doing most of that work. the boeing 737 of this story was one such plane: actually, air canada 143 was quite a new airplane at the time of the accident, and had no flight engineer.
also in the early 1980s? canada was making the switch from the imperial system to metric.
neither of these things is bad in and of themselves. but put together? one of the flight engineer's jobs was to monitor fuel; it hadn't yet been made clear whose job it was now. canada, at the time, was doing refuelling in a convoluted "the fuel is weighed in pounds but put into the plane as liters" system that required Math and Conversion.
let's talk about AIRPLANE FUEL. unlike a car, you don't take your airplane to the station and fill 'er up: fuel has weight, and airplanes care a LOT about weight. way more than you'd imagine. it's the pilot's job to therefore calculate a) how much fuel they need to get from A to B b) how much extra/emergency fuel they need for safety and c) if and when they need to refuel and by how much. is there bad weather in the area? where's the nearest backup airport? if i need Ten Fuels to get to alberta and there's storms in alberta, i need another Two Fuels to circle around and kill time before landing safely, plus another Five Fuels to get to calgary in case alberta is impossible. my airplane is fully loaded, which means it's heavier than usual, so needs another One Fuel for takeoff power. so altogether i need Eighteen Fuels. except i'm in canada in the 1980s so now i need to figure out what that is in liters, and this used to be the flight engineer's job, and idk man. maybe it's 5 liters? that sounds right?
...you see the issue. it isn't that anyone was slacking off, but no one was quite sure what the conversion was, and so instead of giving the soon-to-be Gimli Glider 18 Fuels, they took off in that fucker with nowhere near enough fuel. to make things worse, the plane had a broken fuel gauge, which was a whole other thing and series of comical misunderstandings, but basically it meant that not only was there No Fuel, but the fuel gauges looked something like this:
the very-soon-to-be crashed airplane's day started off normally. they did a little hour long flight from one city to another with no issues. because they knew the fuel gauges were being silly, while on the ground they did a "stick test", which i'm imagining involved a tree branch, basically checking that yep, there was fuel in the tanks, we're good! (in actuality, what it was doing was measuring the weight of the fuel. except, again, they had their maths all backwards, so due to this convoluted conversion process they went "our fuel weighs 5 kilograms, which equals 20 pounds, which equals 18 fuels, which equals 900 liters." just. silly math. i don't want to make these guys out to be idiots: they would obviously have never flown the plane if they had realized their mistake. but the other problem was of course that the process was already convoluted and required multiple conversions; imagine how much worse it would be if, like these pilots, it was a new system you weren't used to!)
so they boarded their passengers and set off from montreal with the intention of flying to edmonton. and that's when things all went terribly wrong.
pictured: the intended and my interpretation of the actual flight.
all this set up leads to the actual flight, which is almost boring in summary: while high up in the sky, the plane suddenly ran out of fuel. this is bad. we do not want this to happen. the pilots had no idea what was happening at first, but i mean: it was pretty obvious. there's no fuel. no engines. no power. you're 30,000 feet in the air in a 64 ton machine and gravity is going hey girllll heyyyy.
but the thing is, airplanes are really cool. like, this is what got me so interested in these plane crashes and accidents: airplanes are awesome. because first of all: just because you weigh as much as a building and are thousands and thousands of meters in the air? doesn't mean the airplane just falls. hell no! without power, an airplane will still stay in the air, losing altitude, sure, but gliding fairly safely and manageably. this doesn't mean you're safe, but: when air canada 143 lost all power, it still had time and options. it also had... the RAT.
the Ram Air Turbine, or the RAT, is an amazing fucking guy. if an airplane loses power? a hatch pops open, and a little propeller drops down automatically. he's wind powered, and he will provide just enough backup power to keep the most critical systems online, even without fuel or engines or god. we LOVE the rat. and the rat leapt into action here, providing the pilots with enough basic systems to keep going.
this doesn't mean that air canada is out of the woods. landing without power is not easy! the trick to landing an airplane is doing it at a nice shallow angle and low speed, which involves things like "doing nice steady turns to line up with a runway" (no time, we're falling steadily), "using engines to get our speed right" (what engines), "getting to the correct altitude and speed to touch down gently" (we have NO POWER we can't go "oopsie too low" and pull up and adjust). if a plane loses too much speed, it WILL fall out of the sky (a stall) because the aerodynamics stop working. if it's going too fast, you're not landing, you're diving cockpit first into the ground. without power, you can turn, but turns will reduce speed. you can't level off or go back up. you are Going In A Downward Direction. the trick is figuring out how fast and how far and aiming at a runway.
this is also where ATC comes in! we love air traffic controllers!! air canada called a mayday, and ATC leapt into action. their job becomes to Get Them What They Need. air canada wants to go anywhere in canada? atc will move everyone out of the way and get them any runway in the northern hemisphere. when this happened, air canada 143 was near winnipeg, which was their initial goal: this IS going to be a crash landing, and the nearer they can be to emergency services, the better. however, the first officer was doing Good Math, calculating their rate of decent vs distance flown, and soon realized that even though they could literally see winnipeg from the windows, they just weren't going to make it. they were falling too fast.
enter: GIMLI. the first officer had actually trained there during his air force days; it's a former base with two runways. it wasn't ideal, because ATC had no information on it and it lacked instruments and equipment (normally, for example, airports will have locator beams and so on to help an aircraft lock on to the runway at the Correct Safe Angle), but... better than a field or lake. one of the dangers of this type of no engine landing is actually being non-committal: waiting too long to make a decision, trying to maximize time in the air rather than land. this makes sense! it's probably pretty human instinct! prolong that crash as long as possible! but it's much, much better to simply Commit and Prepare and Go For It. and that's exactly what air canada now did.
they told ATC they're going to gimli and made the turn. the cabin crew was meanwhile preparing the passengers for a crash landing.
the crazy thing about plane crashes is, actually, that they are very survivable. don't get me wrong: they're bad. people die. but the number of worst case scenarios where dozens of people still, somehow, survive? shockingly high. of course, you don't want ANYONE to die. i would be terrified if it was me. but cabin crew had to know it would probably be... well, not okay. but that if they got everyone prepared and braced, people were going to make it out. people were going to survive this. possibly most of them. possibly all of them.
as the plane approached gimli, problem #87 came up: they were still too fucking fast. they're gliding down! they can't stop! normally, a plane would simply slow down with flaps, or maybe do a couple of big circles before reorienting themselves towards the runway to lose some speed and altitude, but they don't have time -- or altitude. and that's where the theme song KICKS IN
here are reasons you DO NOT DRIFT airplanes, by the way. it can fuck up your engines: engines work in part by taking IN air, so flying at a Drifting Angle means that's all wrong. the aerodynamics are wrong. you're losing speed VERY fast. you can get OUT of the drift, but now your engines are fucked. on the other hand, this plane effectively HAS no engines, but... there's a reason people don't drift planes, okay.
another plot twist: gimli air force base was no more. the runways were still there... but it had been turned into a drag strip, ironically enough. and it was family day! picture this. you're a nice canadian racing fan in 1983, at the strip with your family, cooking hotdogs and poutine on a grill. and a fucking 737 APPEARS OUT OF NOWHERE in front of you. because that is exactly what happened. there were KIDS. on BIKES. with a PLANE HEADING RIGHT TOWARDS THEM. in the mayday episode, the kids tried to outrace the plane in a panic: in the pilot's telling, the kids simply froze in fear.
by the time the pilots realized the runway was occupied, it was way too late to turn back. they landed. in a twist of bad luck that turned into good: without power, they had to manually release their landing gear.... and the nose gear didn't lock. this turned out to be a weirdly good thing: without nose gear, the plane's nose hit the runway and acted as one hell of a brake in ITSELF, grinding on the asphalt as the plane barreled down at high speed. the pilot also intentionally steered the plane into the rail in the middle of the runway, trying to slow the plane even more. and... it worked! the plane came to a stop. everyone was fine. even the kids on bikes.
all this friction caused a small fire in the nose, and so the pilots called for an immediate evacuation to be safe. this caused a bit of an issue: because the nose was on the ground, the butt of the plane was higher than usual, and the back slides were basically just vertical drops. a couple people got mildly hurt using them, as you'd expect.
meanwhile, the drag strip folks were rushing over with fire extinguishers and the like, and the small fire was easily contained (note: do not fuck with burning airplanes. this one had no fuel so COULD be contained). by the time ATC got emergency services to gimli, everyone was safe, ankles were being iced, and presumably everyone was eating hot dogs.
the airplane itself had some minor damage (from when the nose acted as a brake), but was largely intact: it was patched up, refuelled, and took off from gimli a while later, where it flew for another 20 years before retiring of old age.
and that is the story of the Gimli Glider: that time a pilot drifted his plane so hard that he saved the lives of everyone on his plane.
andulkaphoto
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