Air Canada by Peter Pigott

Author:Peter Pigott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2014-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

The Gimli Glider: There is a saying in aviation that fuel in the tanks is limited but gravity is forever. This was never better proven than on July 23, 1983, at Gimli, Manitoba.

None of the passengers suffered injury except one elderly lady who was taken to hospital for shock. All were bused to Winnipeg and put on another Air Canada flight to Edmonton. Only seventy-five litres of fuel were found in the aircraft’s tanks. In Montreal, an Air Canada spokesman said that the airline would ground its four 767s, the airline’s only fully metric plane, whenever routine inspection revealed that their electronic fuel measuring systems were not working. Air Canada sent a repair crew from Winnipeg (legend has it that they too ran out of fuel on the way), and within two days the 767, known henceforth as the “Gimli Glider,” was flown out.

Air Canada’s investigation found Captain Pearson and First Officer Quintal as well as the mechanics in Montreal at fault for running out of fuel. Captain Pearson was demoted for six months to first officer and FO Quintal was suspended for two weeks. However, the Canadian Air Safety Board (soon to become the Transportation Safety Board) differed and ruled that Air Canada was at fault, commending the pilots for “professionalism and skill” in making the landing.

The fuel shortage had occurred, the board said, because of a mix-up between the Imperial and metric systems of measurement, to which Canada had recently converted. This was compounded by a failure of the airline to properly change operating procedures and reassign the fuel checks to the first officer after the third flight crew position, the flight engineer, was no longer on the standard crew manifest. Pearson and Quintal would be reinstated and eventually complete their careers, flying C-GAUN many times more until it was retired to the Mohave desert on January 24, 2008. Both of them were onboard for its last flight from Montreal to the Mohave, when air traffic control in Canada and the United States dubbed the aircraft’s call sign “The Gimli Glider.”[11]

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