Ode to the Gimli Glider

Occasionally, an airliner with a lot of fame (or noteriety, as the case may be) is retired to the sunny climes of Mojave...planes like Continental's Concorde-killing DC-10, the research testbed B-720 known as Embraceable Annie, the oldest DC-9 in the world, Virgin's Spirit of New York, the Los Angeles Dodgers' last team plane and others. A few months ago, a Boeing 767 which gained fame as Air Canada's "Gimli Glider" joined the silent Mojave ranks.

Air Canada's C-GAUN, fin number 604, came about as close to disaster as possible without actually killing anyone, and because of how the story turned out, its pilots were hailed as heroes and the plane came to have a cult-like following.

The plane, crew and its passengers were the victims of simple human error, brought on by a plane built in the U.S. being operated in a country that was trying to get used to the new metric system.

The fateful day was July 23, 1983, and GAUN, flying as ACA Flight 143 left Montreal for Edmonton, with a brief stopover in Ottawa. Because the computerized Fuel Quantity Indicating System (FQIS) in this four-month-old Boeing was on the fritz, fuel quantity was determined visually on the ground by using the aircraft's dripsticks (which isn't so different from checking the fuel quantity on a Model T Ford). This isn't so bad, and is actually a reliable system...except when you do the math wrong. As this was one of the first aircraft delivered to ACA with the fuel measured in litres and kilograms rather than the traditional gallons and pounds, it was ripe for error. On top of that, it was one of the first to be manned with only a two-man crew, and the now-extinct Flight Engineer was the one who'd normally be doing the math. Instead of calculating the weight of a litre of Jet-A in kilograms, the crew accidently did it in pounds, and as a result, the plane had less than half the fuel on board that they thought was there. And as a result, what fuel was there was soon jet exhaust, and the plane became Boeing's big glider.

The closest airport was a partially closed airfield at Gimli, Manitoba. Captain Robert Pearson and FO Maurice Quintal had to fight an airplane with minimal hydraulics for the flight controls and battery power for the electronics. Fortunately, Pearson was a trained glider pilot. When they dropped the gear, they only got two green...the nose gear hanging limply under the plane. They had checked the aircraft's emergency checklist for the correct procedures, and found to their dismay that there was none - no one at Boeing ever thought that a double engine failure was a possibility, and so no procedures had been written. To add to the woes, part of the runway at Gimli had been closed, and was being used as a race course, with hundreds of barbequing race fans on hand as the plane quickly dropped to a committed landing.

On touchdown, braking was limited because there were no spoilers or thrust reversers available, but this deficit was more than made up for by the collapse of the nose gear, which sent up a nice shower of sparks behind the plane (at least the #1 danger in a crash, a fuel-fed fire was not a worry!). The crew's max-effort braking managed to blow out a couple of the mains, and the plane came to a stop on the centerline less than 100 feet from the race crowd. A small nose wheel well fire was quickly extinguised by race course workers. Damage to the plane was minimal, and after some field repairs, it was flown out two days later. Though blamed for the mistake which caused the incident, the flight crew was also honored by Fédération Aéronautique Internationale with their first-ever Diploma for Outstanding Airmanship in 1985.

Fast-forward to January 31, 2008, and the announced final flight of the Gimli Glider, from Montreal to its new home in Mojave...from the Great White North to the Great Brown South, or as the Vancouver Sun put it, "airplane heaven". Pearson and Quintal, as well as several of the original cabin crew, were onboard for the final flight, complete with a low pass down Montreal's runway, and a full tank of gas. To top it all off, as the plane flew to first Tuscon and then to Mojave, its call-sign to air traffic control was "Gimli Glider".

Farewell to the Maple Leaf!

YouTube has a video of the final flyby of 604 as it left Montreal for Mojave.

A detailed account of the incident

CBC news article on final flight

CBC news story from 1 week after the incident