Original subtitles

A brand new 767.

Fuel pressure. Why would that be?

How come I have no instruments?

A catastrophic failure at 26,000 feet.

Winnipeg, Air Canada 143.

Air Canada 143, go ahead.

Just lost both engines.

Holy cow!

I'm talking to a dead man.

Uh, how far are we from Gimli?

You're approximately 12 miles from Gimli right now.

I guess I'll just slip it.

The crew is out of options

and running out of time.

They're at the controls of a 95-tonne jet...

that's quickly falling from the sky.

Mayday! Mayday!

In placid skies over central Canada,

Air Canada Flight 143 is just past the halfway mark

of its journey from Montreal to Edmonton, Alberta.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

This is your first officer...

The plane is carrying

61 passengers and eight crew members.

Beautiful day. Clear temperature at 24 degrees Celsius.

It's July 23rd, 1983.

Hey, that's coming along, huh?

Rick Dion is an Air Canada maintenance engineer.

I was going to Edmonton with my wife Pearl

and my young son Chris who was four-years-old

and this was the beginning

of a two-week vacation for us

and we were all pretty excited

about going on this new airplane.

Compliment of the captain.

Oh, hey, Rob. Thanks.

Whenever you want to come up to the flight deck...

This was my first flight on a modern 767

as the company had just acquired them.

I'll be back in a minute, okay?

I was interested in going to the cockpit

to see all this new technology

fit in with the work that I did on aircraft.

The captain on this flight is Bob Pearson.

He's 48-years-old

and he's spent more than 15,000 hours in the air.

His first officer is Maurice Quintal

who has more than 7,000 hours of flying time.

Come on in.

- Pardon me, gentlemen. - Rick.

I knew Bob Pearson from the small flying club

that I attended in Saint-Lazare

and he was actually one of the local pilots there that used to do some gliding

and he also flew the ultra-light Lazairs.

We had departed heading northwest,

a nice clear sunny day in July.

We're a flight plan of 39,000 feet.

There were a few airplanes that flew that high in 1983

and we requested 41,000 feet

which got us further above the jet stream out of the west.

The crew may have accumulated a lot of hours in the air

but very few in this plane.

It's Boeing's latest and most advanced wide body jet, the 767.

An army of microprocessors in the belly of the plane automates so many functions

that the flight engineer's job has been eliminated.

This is one of four 767s that Air Canada has recently acquired.

The plane itself has only 150 hours on it.

- Quite a difference here, huh? - Oh, yeah.

Reset on and start here.

The cockpit is different

in that all the old instrumentation

that we're accustomed to, mostly that was all gone.

It was all CRT display like, uh small TV screens.

It was a new high-tech airplane

which involved quite a change for the crew

and the maintenance personnel, people handling it.

This was a new aircraft for both the captain and I.

At the time I had 75 hours on that airplane,

so everything was new for me.

Pilots and maintenance crews

are both still getting to know this airliner.

Well then we get that same condition...

Captain Pearson explains to Dion

how he handled a small problem with the engines on an earlier flight.

...comes back down at a low stage and then we just carry on.

You know, that brings up an interesting...

Fuel pressure? Why would that be?

Whoa.

A warning alerts the crew to critically low pressure

at one of the plane's fuel pumps.

Something's wrong with the fuel pump.

The 767 has three main fuel tanks,

two in the wings which are always used

and one in the center, only used on long distance flights.

Electric fuel pumps draw fuel from each tank

and feed it to the plane's two engines.

The low pressure warning could mean that one of the pumps needs maintenance

but it could also be a more serious issue,

a lack of fuel to be pumped.

No forward fuel pump.

I hope it's just a bloody pump failing, I can tell you that.

Another low fuel pressure warning sounds,

this one from another fuel pump on the plane's left side.

Pearson's flight management computer tells him

he should have plenty of fuel for the remainder of the trip.

The 767 also has separate digital fuel gauges,

but on this flight,

those gauges are out of service.

The warnings don't make sense.

It got a little more interesting

when the second fuel boost pump light came on

for that tank which was the left tank.

This seemed quite abnormal

that two pumps would fail in a brand new airplane.

We had some kind of a problem that we didn't understand.

What would your assessment of that be?

My own personal thoughts?

You might be low on the left tank.

I used to be involved with transferring fuel

and I know that when you're trying to empty a tank,

it'll start flashing periodically

and then the pump will re-prime and then the light will go out.

In this case, it appeared to do exactly the same thing.

Captain Pearson knows that if the left tank is running low,

the right tank may be low as well.

Let's head for Winnipeg, now!

Pearson wants to land as soon as possible

in case he is running out of fuel.

The crew is still more than 700 miles away

from their original destination,

Edmonton, Alberta.

The nearest major airport is Winnipeg, Manitoba,

a mere 120 miles away.

We were showing lots of fuel on board our flight management computer

and three normal fuel checks, cross checked with our fuel on our flight plan.

So we elected to divert the flight to Winnipeg

where Air Canada has a main maintenance base.

Winnipeg center, Air Canada 143.

Air Canada 143, go ahead.

Ron Hewett has 20 years' experience as a radar controller.

Yes, sir, we have a problem. We're going to...

Requesting direct Winnipeg.

Air Canada 143, cleared.

Take position direct Winnipeg.

You are cleared to maintain 6,000. Descent your discretion.

Send to 6,000 his discretion and that was it.

He didn't tell us what the problem was

and uh, it's none of my business.

Give him what he wants, get everybody out of his way.

That's about what we do.

Okay. We're out of 4-1-0.

Pearson now begins to descend from 41,000 feet.

Oh, man. They're all going out, eh?

The low pressure warnings are spreading

to more and more of the fuel pumps.

Quintal instructs the cabin crew to prepare for an emergency landing.

- Hello? - Cabin,

we think we have problems with our fuel system.

We are diverting to Winnipeg.

All flight attendants to front galley, please.

I hope this is just false warnings.

Rick, can you think of anything we haven't done?

No, I can't, Bob.

Okay, we've lost the left engine.

Losing an engine erases any doubt.

Flight 143 is, in fact, running out of fuel.

Okay, checklist, single engine landing.

Pearson is trained to land a 767 with one engine.

No one has ever tried landing with none.

He scrambles to get his plane down

so that he doesn't become the first.

With only one engine powering Air Canada Flight 143

and with the possibility of the other engine shutting down,

the crew prepares the passengers for the worst.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your in-charge flight attendant speaking.

Due to mechanical problems we'll be preparing for an emergency landing.

Please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts.

Your crew is fully trained to deal with this situation

and as you may have noticed, some crew members

have already started to prepare the aircraft.

I had no idea like the rest of my crew members

that there was a problem with fuel.

I had no idea why we were going to Winnipeg.

Approach and landing,

- flaps will be 20. - Right.

Ground flap override.

As they're doing that drill,

the right hand fuel pump low pressure light

was flashing as well, much like it did on the left.

They were quite busy carrying out first engine out,

not watching the pump lights

which was right at my eyebrow,

so, I kind of knew that that one there was gonna shut down too.

What was that?

Very shortly we will begin giving you instructions.

How come I have no instruments?

Our beautiful colored engine

and flight instrument displays simply went black.

Ladies and gentlemen, please remain calm.

Please follow our instructions.

Refrain from smoking.

Put your chair back in the upright position.

Secure your seatbelt tightly against your hip.

It's exactly what Pearson had feared.

He's lost both engines.

At 26,500 feet, still 75 miles from the nearest major airport,

he is out of fuel.

Winnipeg, Air Canada 143.

Air Canada 143, go ahead.

We just lost both engines.

When both engines uh shut off,

I think I said, "Holy... I'm talking to a dead man."

We were trained on the simulator

to handle a single engine failure.

We had never practiced and I don't believe most pilots

ever get the chance to practice total engine failures.

One-four-three just lost their engines.

It's highly unlikely that anybody's gonna survive this,

'cause I could see them trying to make a turn and spinning in.

An airplane's engines not only provide thrust,

they also generate the power needed to manipulate the plane.

It would be completely uncontrollable,

but modern airliners are like a Swiss Army knife

with one last blade hidden away.

In the event of a loss of power,

they automatically deploy the RAT, or Ram Air Turbine.

It's spring loaded and the propeller that drives this small hydraulic pump

is about the size of a propeller

you would see, like, on a little Cessna 150

and this arm catapults down into the slipstream.

This propeller starts to turn, drives this hydraulic pump

and it gives you basic systems.

It was pretty quiet flying without motors.

Pearson knows that time is running out.

He needs directions to the closest landing strip.

One-four-three, this is a mayday

and we require a vector on to the closest available runway.

One-four-three, we copy that, all okay?

But the loss of the plane's engines

has had an unexpected consequence at air traffic control.

They're gone.

They were right here.

We've lost them. He's dropped off the screen.

I need primary radar.

Uh, 143, we've lost your transponder return

and are attempting to pick up your target now.

We work on transponder, it's called secondary radar.

We take the pilot's signal to paint the aircraft.

Commercial jetliners are equipped with a transponder,

a device that transmits coded information

which air traffic controllers use to determine the plane's location.

But when Flight 143 lost its second engine,

only a small number of items got backup power.

The transponder was not one of them,

so the plane disappeared from Hewett's screen.

Flight 143 is somewhere east of Winnipeg

but no one knows exactly where

or how far it is from the airport.

In spite of its enormous weight,

a 767 doesn't plunge from the sky when it loses its engines.

Its aerodynamic properties keep it in the air but slowly coasting to earth.

And I was trying to figure

how many miles we were moving ahead

versus how many thousands of feet we were dropping.

But Quintal doesn't have the instruments

which provide the information he needs

to make that calculation.

Since he lost the plane's signal,

Hewett can't give Quintal that information either.

Controllers hurriedly work to rig up a way to find the plane.

Just before landing you will hear the command, "Brace for landing."

Brace immediately and stay braced until the plane comes to a complete stop.

There are two ways to brace.

One, bend forward, raise your arms and hands against the seat back...

Bryce Bell is a businessman on his way home to Edmonton.

As soon as they announced that we were making

an unscheduled stop in Winnipeg,

I immediately wished I hadn't had

the two drinks that I'd had

'cause I thought you're gonna have a split second here

and this plane's gonna explode in flame

and the decision you make in that split second

will depend on how alert you are.

Please put your personal belongings in the seat back pocket.

The response of the passengers

when we were doing the emergency briefing

was basically alert.

They were looking at us.

They were paying attention to every word we were saying.

I couldn't have had better passengers.

I think that's him. Let's say that's him.

Because their modern equipment can't see Air Canada 143,

the controllers switch to old fashioned radar

which doesn't need a transponder to locate planes.

I gotta turn up my true radar, the reflective radar,

which is not nearly as good

and we don't use it at all if we can help it.

Okay, I got it. Sixty-five from Winnipeg, forty-five from Gimli.

Uh, 143, we have you at 65 miles from Winnipeg

and approximately 45 miles from Gimli.

For the first time since losing power,

the pilots know their distance to Winnipeg.

We might make Winnipeg.

Quintal, however, thinks that Gimli is a safer bet.

Gimli, Manitoba has a decommissioned air force base.

It's about 20 miles closer than Winnipeg.

As luck would have it, Maurice Quintal trained at Gimli

while in the armed forces.

He knows it well.

Forty-five miles to Gimli. That is a long runway.

Uh, is there emergency equipment at Gimli?

Negative emergency equipment at all,

just one runway available, I believe,

and uh, no control tower and no information on it.

Pearson must consider the possibility of a crash landing.

If he has any chance of making it to Winnipeg,

which has full emergency support, he knows he must try for it.

Okay then, we would prefer Winnipeg.

Fine, 143, continue your present heading.

We all reacted very business-like

and say something specifically to the situation

but never would we ever look at each other.

I think we were all afraid that we might break down.

Parents were hugging their little kids

and people were busy scribbling away

which I found out afterwards were...

They were writing their notes to loved ones and their wills

and all kinds of things like that.

It was pretty nerve-wracking.

One-four-three, a question if you have the time.

Okay, go ahead.

Total number of persons on board, please.

The actual number of people on board is 69

but Quintal is overtaxed.

He gives a lower number in error.

I have 33 people onboard, including the crew.

Okay.

I have to ask if souls onboard.

Uh, I know he's busy,

I don't want to ask him questions but I have to.

This thing could go down in the lake or the field,

um, and I remember thinking,

"Great. I know this airplane carries about 300 people.

"At least it's not 300."

It was about regrets. It was about things I hadn't done in my life.

It was about ways I'd treated the odd person here or there

that I wish I'd treated more gently.

It was about how stupid I was at some of the things

I used to make big issues out of that are so insignificant

when it really comes down to what real reality is about.

It was pretty devastating.

And I remember telling a mother with a baby and I had...

...my daughter, Victoria,

and telling this woman

that it was gonna be okay and I did it.

I did and I was so proud of myself

that I could be so straight with her

and tell her that it was gonna be all right

and really look at her in the eyes.

Okay, how far from the field are we now?

You are 35... Correction, make that 39 miles

from Winnipeg.

Roger.

Now that controllers can see Flight 143 on radar,

they can provide Quintal with the information he needs

to figure out if he can glide as far as Winnipeg.

Roger. What is your altitude now?

Eight-point-five.

Eight-point-five.

About 8,500 feet above the ground,

Captain Pearson can see his destination.

Winnipeg's airport is less than 35 miles away.

We have visual.

But the news from Quintal is not good.

Bob?

Maurice was calmly keeping track of our distance

by input from Winnipeg air traffic control

and our altitude

and he calculated our profile and came to the conclusion

that we might not make the runway in Winnipeg.

We can last maybe another 20 miles.

We... we're not gonna make Winnipeg.

Quintal has calculated that at the rate they're falling,

they would hit the ground a full 15 miles short of the runway.

Uh, how far are we from Gimli?

You're approximately 12 miles from Gimli right now.

Uh where is it?

Which way is he moving?

On your right. Turn right to a heading

of three-four-five.

I would say you have ten miles to fly.

Okay, fine. We're gonna go there.

I'm gonna go check on my family.

You guys don't need me up here right now, huh?

- No, no. We're okay. - Okay.

Don't worry about it. Everything's okay. They got it under control.

Make sure your seat belts are tight, all right?

When I went finally to sit down in my seat,

this is where I thought, "Wow," you know, "This is it."

- Landing gear down. - Roger.

First Officer Quintal lowers the landing gear.

Because there's no hydraulic power,

Quintal does what's known as a "gravity drop",

letting the gear's own weight drop and lock it into place.

The two main gear are heavy.

They fall immediately and two green lights confirm they have locked.

But the nose gear is lighter. It doesn't lock.

We could hear the main gear clearly falling and locking.

I was not aware that the nose gear was not down and locked.

It was sort of last minute and if it's something that you cannot control,

you don't talk of it. You don't mention it.

You know, the main thing was bring the aircraft on the runway.

- Five miles to touch down. - Roger.

We have the field in sight.

Five-miles from Gimli,

Pearson and Quintal finally see a runway they can land on.

But there is a problem.

We're too close, huh? It's gonna be too steep, too fast.

Yeah, I know.

Pearson is almost at the runway but he's much too high above it.

If he comes down at a normal descent rate, he'll miss the landing strip.

But if he comes down steeply, his plane will gather a dangerous amount of speed.

He won't be able to stop before the end of the runway.

In the normal approach we have leading edge and trailing edge flaps

which allow us to slow the airplane down

and fly at a slower speed safely.

We did not have those flaps

as they run off the main hydraulic system.

So now what are we gonna do?

So we discuss, we have two possibilities.

One of them was to do a 360 degree turn

and lose the excess of altitude.

On the other hand, I thought it would take about three minutes

and we were already

descending at a rate of 2,500 feet a minute.

Only about 3,000 feet above the ground,

the plane doesn't have enough altitude to make a full circle.

It would hit the ground before making it back to the landing strip.

Pearson chooses a second option.

Well, I guess I'll just slip it.

Pearson decides to try a maneuver called a "sideslip",

practically unheard of on commercial airliners

but sometimes used by glider pilots.

And Bob Pearson has a lot of experience flying gliders.

I'm just gonna slip it down to where we're almost down

at the runway then I'll straighten out.

Okay.

Side-slipping involves

what's known as "crossing the controls."

Here we go.

Pearson plans to force the aircraft into a sideways freefall,

allowing it to drop quickly without increasing its forward airspeed.

Pearson has never actually performed a sideslip in a glider

but he's attempting one now, in a Boeing 767.

The only way that I could control our speed

and our descent profile with the runway

was to induce drag in the fuselage

by cross controlling the rudder and the elevators on the tail

and the ailerons on the wing tips

and cause the aircraft into a crab configuration.

Then I can vary that to increase or decrease our speed

or increase or decrease our descent rate.

Pearson controls the plane's descent

by using his rudders and ailerons to change the angle of the plane.

Crossing the controls involves tipping the wings in one direction

but turning the aircraft in the opposite direction,

pushing it sideways into the oncoming air.

As Flight 143 begins to drop towards the earth,

Quintal is about to discover something he did not expect.

The runway he trained at 15 years ago...

...is no longer a runway.

Captain Bob Pearson is out of fuel, out of engines, out of options.

If he can't line up with the runway at Gimli, he doesn't get a second chance.

Pearson turns the yoke left and pushes the rudders to the right.

The plane slips... to its left.

We're sitting in the center which is the heart of the airplane where it starts,

so, it's pretty solid there.

I thought there's a real good chance here that we'll be all right.

However, when he put the airplane into a sideslip,

all that went out the window 'cause I figured,

"Well, if he hits a wing or something and starts to catapult and roll,

"that's not gonna work anymore."

The 767 loses altitude quickly,

plowing sideways through the air.

When I looked to the left of the aircraft,

I was looking directly at the ground

because the airplane is angled quite...

I don't know, about maybe 60 degrees of banks.

The bank angle was quite high

and the nose of the aircraft was quite high

and it was an awkward moment and if it was awkward for me,

I can imagine for the passengers, it must really have felt odd.

I saw a sand trap from this golf course

and I thought we're gonna crash.

Pearson must maintain a crucial balance.

He's got to slow the plane enough to be able to land safely,

but if he slows down too much,

the airliner could lose its lift and plummet to the ground.

When a pilot is normally landing an airplane,

he's maneuvering the flight controls

and operating the thrust levers

pretty continuously in most landings

and so I was doing the same thing without the thrust levers.

I swear I thought of my daughter Victoria being alone with my husband

and how he was gonna cope with our daughter

and how she was gonna cope without having a mom.

As they approach, Pearson focuses on his target, the threshold of the runway.

I got tunnel vision like I've never had it before.

It was just our speed and our relationship with the threshold of the runway.

But now, only hundreds of feet from the ground,

Quintal sees that their troubles are far from over.

The Gimli landing strip has been converted...

...into a drag racing strip.

Today is Saturday, and it's not just a race day.

It's a family day on the Gimli strip.

Racing is done for the day.

But the airfield is filled with members of the local sports car club

camping out with their families for the weekend.

Two children have decided to pedal the length of the runway.

They don't hear the plane coming for them.

Without engines it's silent.

And one thing the 767 doesn't have... is a horn.

Brace. Brace for landing.

The nose hit with quite a bang on the runway.

It sounded like a shotgun going off at our feet.

The front landing gear gives out immediately.

Pearson brakes hard. Two tires blow out.

The bottom of the right engine scrapes the runway.

I was a robot. There was just no emotion at all.

Finally, Pearson sees what's in their path.

And I looked up and I could see two boys on bicycles

and they must have been probably about 1,000 feet down the runway

from our position when I saw them.

And then at one point I could see he raised his head and he's surprised.

Here's this big aircraft.

And I can still remember the look of terror on their faces.

So, they were close enough for me to see that.

With no nose gear to steer with,

Pearson's only hope of driving the plane left or right

is by varying the brake pressure on the two main landing gear.

That's when my heart started

to pitter-patter a little bit.

The kids panic and try to outrun a plane

that's traveling about 200 miles an hour.

I knew I couldn't take the airplane into these boys

and I was gonna take it off into the grass on the right side.

There were campers along the west side of the runway

that I didn't notice until after we'd touched down

and the nose was on the ground

and I can still remember at the left side people standing by their barbecues.

Dino Calvert is at the track with his friends for a weekend of racing.

One of the gentlemen in the pits

suddenly jumped in his car, and he took off

and I thought, "Well, you don't drive like that

"in the pits usually,"

and I looked up and all I could see was smoke rising.

Pearson does all he can to stop the plane in time.

Holy crow!

The plane plows into a guardrail installed down the middle of the runway.

Smoke, Bob.

Seventeen minutes after running out of fuel,

Air Canada Flight 143 comes to a final stop on the ground.

Yeah? You okay?

Somebody yelled "yahoo" or something and people started applauding

and we were so grateful, we made it.

When you believe that you're gonna crash,

you do believe that the airplane is gonna break apart,

you're gonna have fire.

Evacuate! Evacuate!

Evacuate!

All right, let's go. We gotta get off the plane.

Thick smoke is quickly filling the cabin.

The crew doesn't take any chances.

They want everyone off the plane as quickly as possible.

There was a sense of joy and then a panic kind of...

It seemed to go in waves and then a panic saying, "We gotta get out of here,

"we gotta get out of here."

Less than two months earlier,

an Air Canada DC-9 made a successful emergency landing in Cincinnati

only to burst into flames on the tarmac

before all the passengers could get off.

Twenty-three people died.

The crew and passengers of this flight want to avoid a similar fate.

It took maybe just a few seconds

to come up to a full halt on the runway

but the cockpit was full of smoke.

Passenger evacuation checklist.

Passenger checklist. Fuel shut off.

Off.

Cabin pressurized.

- Electrics off. - Electrics off.

- Checklist complete. - Time to get out of here.

Come on, guys, get some fire extinguishers.

We grabbed the fire extinguishers on our way

and you never go to a fire at a racetrack without having a fire extinguisher with you

and we ran up towards it.

The doors open up and you see the chutes come out sort of like a spider growing legs.

The plane ended up eventually standing almost

what would appear to me to be almost on its nose.

When I opened my door and I saw that the chute was so steep,

I thought, "Oh, my goodness. How do I get these passengers to go down?"

Due to the nose-down angle of the plane,

the two rear slides don't reach the ground.

Ten people are slightly injured during the evacuation,

most of them coming down the steep rear slides.

I heard on the west radar frequency, he said...

One of the 767's says, "He's down okay. He's in one piece."

And that's when our cheer went up.

I said, "Okay,"

because all of these people were gonna sleep

in their own bed that night.

There's still a lot of smoke coming from the plane's nose.

It turned out it was about six inches of insulation

between the inner and outer skin

from friction that was starting to burn.

The flight attendants have good news.

All 61 passengers have made it off the plane.

There's not so much as a single serious injury.

- We'll give you a hand. - Yeah, the extinguisher.

Bob Pearson has done what no one has done before.

He safely landed a 767 with no engines,

gliding to safety from more than 26,000 feet.

Air Canada Flight 143 glided...

The event makes international headlines immediately.

People are already asking

how one of the most sophisticated passenger planes in the world

could have run out of fuel.

...by sliding down emergency chutes.

By the next day, the investigation has already begun.

Bill Taylor and Diane Rocheleau of Canada's Aviation Safety Bureau

are among the first investigators at the scene.

I was a junior mechanical engineer at the time.

I had been working for Transport Canada for a year.

Going to the field for the first time

was very exciting.

It was new, it was a major aircraft.

Once we got into the fuel quantity indicating system,

I actually left Diane

to deal with the specifics of the computer system.

First, Bill Taylor needs to confirm

what everyone has been telling him,

that the plane is out of fuel.

Investigators drain the tanks, collecting less than 17 gallons of fuel.

The 767 can hold almost 24,000 gallons.

It's like having five tablespoons of fuel in a mid-sized car.

Taylor next needs to examine the possibility

that the fuel leaked out during the flight.

The other checks involved looking for

any evidence of fuel having been lost.

We even went so far as to go into

what they call the dry bay of the aircraft.

I'm a bit claustrophobic, so I really wasn't too enthused about going up in there

but I crawled up and had a look around with a flashlight

and confirmed that there was no evidence of fuel having been lost in there.

That leaves Taylor with only one conclusion.

Flight 143 took off without enough fuel.

Now investigators need to find out why.

I can't believe it's in one piece.

Diane Rocheleau begins looking for the answer to that question

in the plane's sophisticated electronics bay located beneath the cabin.

The 767 was a newer type aircraft

and it did have a lot of computerized system

and I guess back in 1982, these were coming on to the market at a fast rate

and they were newer types of electronic system.

Rocheleau confirms that a computerized unit,

the digital fuel gauge processor,

had been malfunctioning on this plane.

There was no spare in Montreal, so it couldn't be replaced.

Rocheleau takes the component for testing.

It was decided early on that the unit, the fuel processing unit

would be taken to the manufacturer Honeywell in Indianapolis for testing

and I was tasked with taking the unit,

so we went through all the testing procedure

and then at one point we did discover

that there was a malfunction with the unit.

During the testing, we went more and more in depth

and we found out that one of the circuit, it's called an inductor coil,

it was a very, very small part and it was encapsulated at manufacture.

And encapsulated means it's covered with plastic.

You cannot visually see it because it's now covered with plastic

and you can't see the inductor coil itself

but once we took over the plastic case

we could see that the solder joint had not been made properly

which caused a malfunction in the system.

The faulty processor explains

why Pearson didn't have fuel gauges for the flight

but doesn't explain why he didn't have enough fuel.

The inoperative gauges were clearly flagged.

Ground crews wouldn't have relied on them

when they were fueling the plane.

Investigators confirm that the ground crew

did perform a manual check of the fuel before takeoff.

We just need to know what you did next.

Yeah? We did a manual check of both tanks

and then we pump enough fuel for the trip to Edmonton.

Flight 143 should have taken off with enough fuel for the trip.

Okay, thanks.

That helps.

Investigators now have to figure out

how one of the world's most advanced jetliners

took off with half the fuel necessary for its flight.

The investigators know that with its fuel gauges out of service,

Flight 143's fuel tanks were checked manually.

Then the fuel for the trip to Edmonton was added to the tanks.

But before the plane could be given more fuel,

a crucial calculation had to be carried out.

Pilots need to know the weight of the fuel on their plane,

but fuel trucks pump jet fuel by volume.

In order for pilots and fuelers to communicate,

a simple routine translation between volume and weight has to be made.

Thank you.

Investigators check and double-check that math.

The fueling records from the day of the accident

provide the answers they have been looking for.

This is a typical fueling record.

But when investigators examine

the calculations for Flight 143...

And this is from Flight 143.

...they look anything but straightforward.

The document clearly shows the amount of fuel in the right and left tanks.

But investigators are troubled by two particular numbers.

One converts volume to kilograms,

the other converts it to pounds.

He shouldn't have been using both.

So did you convert to pounds or to kilograms?

To pound.

No, to... to kilo.

Can I see that again?

Further interviews with the technicians and crew

reveal that the events on Flight 143...

I don't know what I did.

...were caused by human error involving poor calculations

and ultimately inadequate training.

Okay, fellows, we've finished the fueling...

The technicians refueling Flight 143

got muddled in their calculations

while converting the volume coming out of the fuel truck

to the weight of the fuel in the plane's tanks.

No one who saw the calculations that day noticed the basic error.

In 1983, Canadian ground crews were used

to converting the amount of fuel

leaving their trucks into pounds.

The 767 was the first plane in Air Canada's fleet to have metric fuel gauges.

It's fuel should've been measured not in pounds but in kilograms,

which requires a different calculation.

Flight 143 needed 22,300 kilograms of fuel for the trip,

but pilots and technicians let it leave with 22,300 pounds instead.

Because a pound is about half-a-kilogram,

the plane only got half the fuel it required,

which explains why Pearson's flight computer told him he had plenty of fuel.

He entered the wrong amount of fuel to start with.

In the past, the flight engineer calculated the fuel loads.

This accident raised an important question,

"Whose job was it with the two-man crew?"

Better training is definitely an issue

in an incident such as that.

If everyone is trained

and the lines are drawn as to who's responsible for what,

then there's no ambiguity on it.

People know what they're responsible for.

In this case, it was sort of open-ended.

We weren't aware who was responsible

for the final say on this fuel stuff.

A subsequent inquiry

found that none of those involved that day

was trained in metric calculations.

Not the ground technicians, not the pilots.

I had not received any...

Neither of us had received any training at all

on doing these calculations.

The computer that had replaced the 767's flight engineer was broken,

and no one knew who should be doing its job.

Air Canada 143 was essentially down a man.

And the goal is to prevent

a recurrence of this particular event

and also we find out other system

that might have been either at fault

or maybe they could cause a problem in the future

and you do try to prevent recurrence.

All right!

It took a string of mechanical and human failures

for Flight 143 to run out of fuel.

But another failure that day may have saved some lives.

If the plane's nose gear had not collapsed,

it would have taken Pearson much longer to stop.

The plane could have slid into the people who were at the strip that day,

which would have had catastrophic results.

There could have been more injuries or even loss of life.

Pearson and Quintal were partly blamed for their roles in the incident.

A government inquiry recommended that Air Canada reevaluate

the training of flight crews and ground technicians in metric fuel conversions.

It also recommended that the airline keep more spare parts,

such as fuel gauge processors.

Rick Dion retired in 2003

after a long career as Air Canada's coordinator of maintenance control.

First Officer Maurice Quintal was promoted to captain in 1989.

Captain Bob Pearson went on to fly ten more years for Air Canada,

his experience at Gimli shaping the rest of his career as a commercial pilot.

This experience affected me mostly by giving me...

Making me more relaxed as a pilot,

giving me the feeling that

as much as I've trained for all those years

that there's always that question about how you're gonna perform

when the chips are down and I now have the feeling that no matter what,

as long as an aircraft stays together,

I would get it safely back on the ground

and so it's been a relaxing experience.

It's the knowledge that you know under stress you can perform.

Before that you don't know.

You just hope you will and you train,

you train for it but you never know.

With the things that they had to deal with, it was magnificent.

I think it got proven in the simulator in Vancouver.

They tried out these same circumstances

with several crews and they all crashed.

Probably the most important thing that came out of it was the realization

that when something new is introduced,

special attention and training needs to be accomplished

for people to be aware of what they're dealing with.

When we had landed and the airplane was all in one piece,

I thought, "Wow, I got another chance to fly again."

Because of a tragedy like that,

once you take your deck of cards

and fire it in the air, you're truly free

and I guess from that point of view, I could...

I find it very difficult to say but Gimli was...

Maybe almost the best thing that ever happened to me,

next to meeting my wonderful wife and marrying her.

Two days after the landing at Gimli,

Air Canada's 767 was back in the air on its way to Winnipeg for repairs.

A quarter century later, that same plane is still in service

and it still carries the nickname that Bob Pearson earned it...

The Gimli Glider.