Gliders are very small and designed to fly without engine but when 100 ton Boeing 767 flies like glider and lands safely that’s amazing. It happened on July 23, 1983 when an Air Canada Boeing 767 was heading to Edmonton, Alberta from Ottawa. It was 2,800 kilometer trip.
While on sky captain Robert Pearson and Co-Pilot Maurice Quintal suddenly found they are running out of fuel. They had no hope to reach destination. When they lost both engines they had only one option that was to glide the aircraft like a glider and find a landing spot. At that time is was 12,500 meters above mean sea level.
They managed to glide the aircraft on an abandoned air force base. It’s not an easy task. When engine fails electricity also fails as a result many control systems on board fails. At the end one died and none of the 61 passengers and 8 crews were injured seriously. This aircraft got the nick name ‘Gimli’ because it landed on Gimli base.
And all these happened only because of a miscalculation. Ground crews thought they have fully refueled the jet but actually it wasn’t. That aircrafts computer system to monitor fuel level was not working so crews checked it manually. Canada has been using old British units but at that time they were in the process of introducing metric system. Their new aircrafts were also calibrated to metric system. Ground crews forgot the matter and calculated in old fashion. They filled only half of the fuel required and thought aircraft is ready for the flight to Edmonton.
