Long-Form:
When a botched imperial-to-metric conversion left a commercial jet with insufficient fuel, pilots had to improvise.

Written by Alan Bellows

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Non-Fiction

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November 2007

© 2007 All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute or repurpose this work without written permission from the copyright holder(s).

Printed from https://www.damninteresting.com/the-gimli-glider/

“Holy shit.”

Inside the cockpit of the cruising airliner, Captain Bob Pearson was understandably alarmed at the out-of-the-ordinary beeps that were chiming from his flight computer. On the control panel, an amber low fuel pressure warning lamp lit up to punctuate the audio alarm.

First Officer Maurice Quintal, copilot of Air Canada Flight 143, checked the indicator light to determine the cause of the computer’s complaints. “Something’s wrong with the fuel pump,” he reported.

The mustachioed Captain Pearson pulled out the trusty Boeing handbook, his fingers dashing through the pages to find the specifics of the warning. To his relief, the troubleshooting chart indicated that the situation was not as perilous as it might seem: the fuel pump in the left wing tank was signaling a problem, a minor issue considering that gravity would continue to feed the engines even if the pump failed.

“You know,” he commented to Copilot Quintal, “I would not take this air…” He trailed off as the computer blurted out another four beeps, and the indicator panel lit up like a Christmas tree decorated with bad news. “Oh fuck,” Pearson lamented, “we’ve got to go to Winnipeg.”

The date was 23 July 1983, and although the fuel pressure warnings were not the flight’s first mechanical frustrations, they were certainly the most distressing so far. When pilots Pearson and Quintal had arrived for their shift earlier that day, they had been notified that the plane’s fuel gauges were non-functional due to a fault in the Fuel Quantity Indicator System (FQIS). Even worse, the component required to repair it could not be delivered until later that evening.

Rather than canceling the flight, Captain Pearson instructed the engineers to check the fuel level manually. The four-month-old 767 was a state-of-the-art machine with state-of-the-art glitches, and FQIS issues were becoming a common complaint. Several independent dripstick checks later, the fuel hosers were satisfied that sufficient fuel was loaded, and they advised Air Canada Flight 143 to take off. The airliner departed from Montreal at 5:48pm eastern time with their sixty-one passengers. At 6:58pm they made a brief scheduled stopover in Ottawa, where engineers once again checked the fuel dripsticks⁠— just to be safe.

It was just after 8:00pm central time that the cockpit computer began its string of inexplicable beeps and warning lights. As the jumbo jet crossed the Canadian countryside at 41,000 feet, Copilot Quintal thumbed through the 767 handbook to ascertain the nature of the airplane’s problem. “They don’t say anything if you’ve got more than one though, main tank, eh?” he said to Captain Pearson, as well as the flight engineer who had joined them. “Like there’s two pumps, they don’t say anything about only one, eh?” According to the computer’s calculations there should have been plenty of fuel remaining, but multiple fuel pumps were indicating pressure problems. The flummoxed flight crew decided to divert to the nearby Winnipeg airport as a precaution, and alerted Air Traffic Control (ATC) of their intent.

“Air Canada 143 cleared present position direct Winnipeg,” the tower responded. “We’re landing runway 31. You’re cleared to maintain six thousand descent your discretion.” Pearson and Quintal updated their flight computer with the new heading and destination. “Air Canada 143 did you want any assistance?” the traffic controller inquired, where “assistance” is an aeronautic euphemism for a reception from the fire brigade.

“For the moment we won’t require any assistance,” Pearson responded.

The flight engineer struggled to assess the situation. “You’ve got nothing in the center tanks, eh?” he inquired of the captain.

“No, we ran the pumps,” the captain replied, referring to an earlier attempt to transfer fuel from another tank. “Uh, let’s put them back on again.” Within moments, several more warning lights snapped on in quick succession. “Holy shit.”

“God damn,” Quintal remarked, “they’re all going out, eh? How about uh…”

“All the lights are on,” Pearson observed soberly, as the array of low fuel pressure indicators glowed with incandescent urgency. The captain summoned the in-charge flight attendant to the cockpit and apprised him of the situation, but his summary was outdated mere moments later. The flight computer bellowed out a flamboyant BONG! which none of the men present could recall having heard before.

“Okay,” the captain observed upon examining the instruments, “We’ve lost the left engine.”

“Okay, what…will we do?” Quintal replied. “Want the checklist now?”

“Checklist, yeah.”

The pilots began preparations for a delicate-but-very-doable single-engine landi