1983 Gimli Plane Crash that Almost Happened

Imagine the surprise of two pilots who, in July 1983, without fuel, successfully brought a Boeing 767 to an emergency landing on an abandoned air force air strip. They found, not an empty runway, but a car race taking place in what was now a raceway.

Imagine the surprise of the pit crews and crowd as the huge jet dropped from the sky and rolled its way toward them, slowed by a partially-deployed front wheel.

This was the event for which most people know Gimli, Manitoba. It's a town about an hour's drive north of Winnipeg, where I spent a lot of weekends and summers as a kid. The Gimli Glider, as the  Air Canada plane was called, made international news for an air emergency that didn't end in disaster.

One of the factors that caused the plane to run out of fuel between Ottawa and Edmonton was the introduction of a new plane to the fleet and new metric standards, without timely training and manuals. After a fuel tank gauge malfunctioned, the maintenance crews and pilots had plenty of time to sort out what amount of fuel the plane needed for the flight, but they ended up using the wrong ratio to make their calculations

Two factors that saved lives were the experience pilot Robert Pearson had as a glider pilot, and the familiarity co-pilot Maurice Quintal had with the Gimli air strip, where he had been stationed with the Royal Canadian Air Force. When both engines stopped running and hydraulics were severely limited, Pearson improvised to get the plane down. At one point he realized he was going to almost overshoot the runway, so he used a gliding maneuvre called a sideslip to get the plane low enough to land at the start of the runway.

As for Gimli, the economic disaster predicted when the air base closed down never materialized. It's a trading centre for some of the Interlake region of Manitoba, and a tourism destination. The New Iceland Heritage Museum opened in 2000, profiling the area's history as a settlement for Icelandic immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Check out the CBC archives for a sound clip after the plane landed safely. For a description of the emergency landing, see Wade Nelson's article. For more on the metric conversion error that caused the problem, see Peter Banks' article.

The photo above was taken by Wayne Glowacki of the Winnipeg Free Press.

Previous post:

Air Crash: Language and Expectations

Thanks to Keizo Gates for the link.

Comments

[Judy Gombita]

I think film buffs know Gimli, Manitoba thanks to auteur Guy Maddin's Tales from the Gimli Hospital....

[Eric Eggertson]

That's true, Judy. I'm not sure the Chamber of Commerce knew what to make of Guy's use and abuse of local lore in his film, but it helped put Gimli on the map for film afficionados around the world.

[Judy Gombita]

Well, in general there's a lot of people who can't make head or tails of Guy Maddin's films. (I remember the commercial screening of The Saddest Music in the World, where the sound of seats banging up occured steadily for about the first half hour. It appeared to be mainly 60 plus folks leaving...there was a lot of muttering about, "What the heck the critics saw in this piece of garbage.")

I don't know if you've seen his 1992 film, Careful, but I was thinking that it was a good analogy for the current election, particularly in regards to the Liberal Party. :-)

Readers may be interested to know that Guy Maddin's family had the cottage down the road from Eric's family, so Eric knows the eccentric genius first-hand.

None of which has anything to do with the Gimli plane crash (which, quite frankly, I don't recall hearing about before). It's just that Gimli and Maddin are intertwined in my mind.