A Dead-Stick Landing

Air Canada Flight 143 was cruising smoothly at 39,000 ft. in clear skies above the Manitoba prairie when Pilot Bob Pearson saw a warning light blink on. The message: fuel in one tank had run out. Seconds later, one engine of the brand-new Boeing 767 coughed and died. As Pearson attempted to restart it, five more warning lights began to flash. Then, the twin-engine jet's other engine stopped. There was nothing but an eerie and chilling silence.

As the powerless craft began to lose altitude, First Officer Marcel Quintal, a Royal Canadian Air Force veteran, remembered an abandoned military strip at Gimli, 60 miles to the southwest. In the hushed cabin, the flight attendants told the 61 passengers to prepare for a crash landing.

Like all commercial jets, the 767 is designed to glide without power for a distance at least 16 times its altitude. In the case of Air Canada Flight 143, that meant more than 100 miles. As soon as the second engine went out, an elaborate series of automatic backup mechanisms was activated. A 24-volt nickel-cadmium emergency battery took over the plane's dead electrical system, providing enough juice to operate the radio and the key instruments in the cockpit. At the same time, a ram-air turbine dropped into position beneath the aircraft's belly. The airstream passing through the turbine generated enough pressure to activate the part of the hydraulic system that controls the flight spoilers, rudder and ailerons. This allowed Pearson, who happened to be an experienced glider pilot, to control the craft. The turbine also provided sufficient power to allow the pilot to release the landing gear, which then fell into place automatically.

Still, a powerless landing poses major difficulties. The flaps, which normally slow a plane down while increasing its lift, cannot be operated by the weakened hydraulic system. As a result, a 767 without power lands at about 210 m.p.h., instead of the usual 150 m.p.h. Nor can a pilot come around for a second try if he does not like his approach. Says Boeing Spokesman Tom Cole: "You only get one chance."

Pearson might have wanted a second try, for Gimli was anything but abandoned. The 150 members of the Winnipeg Sports Car Club had come out to the strip for a weekend of car racing. As the jet bore down on the strip, they dived for cover. Recalls Art Zuke, 14, who was pedaling his bicycle on the tarmac: "I saw this thing flying sort of sideways. It was getting lower and lower and closer and closer."

Seconds later, the 767 hit the 6,800-ft.-long runway with such force that the nose wheel collapsed under it. Sparks flew and clouds of black smoke trailed from the tires as Pearson locked the brakes. Said Passenger Bryce Bell: "People were screaming, kids were crying." The plane finally came to a stop just 300 yds. short of a cluster of trailers filled with families. The only casualties: several passengers who were slightly injured as they slid down the plane's emergency escape chutes.

Air Canada announced last week that the probable cause of Flight 143's engine failures was stunningly prosaic: the plane, which had made roughly half of its 2,200-mile trip from Montreal to Edmonton, had simply run out of gas. The most likely explanation: a combination of equipment failure and human error. Before taking off, Pearson had been told that the microcircuitry that monitors fuel levels was malfunctioning; on two occasions, therefore, he ordered mechanics to measure the supply manually. Unlike the other planes in Air Canada's fleet, however, the 767 uses metric calibrations. Apparently the ground crew, accustomed to working with gallons and pounds, made an error in converting pounds of jet fuel to kilograms. Pearson believed that he had enough fuel for the trip when in fact he was 26,000 lbs. short. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.