Air Canada Flight 143 bound for Edmonton ran out of fuel mid-air after ground crews used pounds instead of kilograms while calculating its load; pilots glided the powerless Boeing 767 to safety but faced consequences

It was a “family day” for the Winnipeg Sports Car Club in the small Canadian town of Gimli, Manitoba, on July 23, 1983. Families and campers who had gathered at the former Royal Canadian Air Force base for the go-kart races suddenly heard two boys bragging about a plane crash.

“All of the sudden there was a 767 right there,” Dave Brown, who was tending to a barbecue with a beer in his hand, described the extraordinary situation 40 years after the incident in 2023 to Global News.

The aircraft with 61 passengers and 8 crew had run out of fuel thousands of feet above the ground, but somehow managed to land without any casualties. But the 1983 plane crash of Manibota is one of the rarest of its kind of aviation mishap, known as “Gimli Glider” which happened because of a minuscule metric miscalculation of airplane fuel.

A metric conversion error leaves the plane short of fuel

Air Canada Flight 143’s fuel supply was running out after taking off from Montreal for Edmonton. “The Boeing 767 was the first metric plane to fly in Canada,” CBC News reported, covering the incident in a 2018 report.

According to the Canadian outlet, the plane's fuel-quantity information system malfunctioned, and the ground crew had to calculate the fuel load manually using the specific gravity of jet fuel.

But the conversion factor “they used was 1.77 pounds/liter,” instead of the all-metric 0.8 kg/liter required for the new 767, the publication wrote. So the crew actually loaded only half the fuel it needed to reach Edmonton.

The pilots understood the fuel shortage when the plane was near Ontario’s Red Lake, little over halfway between Montreal and Edmonton.

How a glider pilot saved 69 people

Captain Robert Pearson, who was an experienced glider pilot, alongside First Officer Maurice Quintal, calculated that without both engines working properly, they would not reach the nearest airport for emergency refueling in Winnipeg.

Quintal, who had previously been stationed at the Gimli air base, knew the location and was familiar with the landing strips.

The pilots somehow kept the powerless Boeing 767 airborne for about 17 long minutes before reaching Gimli.

“This was, like, one in a million that this guy landed this plane because people with double engine failures usually don’t make it back,” Al Marcoux, a volunteer at the motorsports track who witnessed the incident, told Global News. The landing, however, was expectedly not a routine one.

A runway full of families and go-kart racers

As the engines were shut and the plane lost hydraulic power, the landing nose could not be properly aligned, needed for the landing, CBC News noted. During landing, its nose struck the ground, which caused a fire and sparks along the tarmac. Go-kart racers present there extinguished it with fire extinguishers.

As the nose gear failed, the airplane’s tail rose high. Some passengers were injured while evacuating down the rear emergency slide, but no injuries were reported after the emergency landing.

“It put Gimli on the map,” Marcoux told Global News, on how the plane’s emergency landing made the tiny town of less than 2,000 people at that time popular in aviation history.

The aftermath of the Gimli Glider

The aircraft was repaired at Gimli and flown to Winnipeg, and eventually returned to commercial service. It retired in 2008. Although the pilots saved themselves along with the passengers and crews, it was consequential for them. On October 4, 1983, Air Canada demoted the pilot and suspended the co-pilot for six weeks for “allowing the near-tragedy to happen,” CBS wrote.

Three ground workers were also suspended. A 1985 Transport Canada report identified errors, inadequate training, and shortcomings in safety procedures.

However, Brown, who assisted the initial rescue works, holds a different account of the incident. He told Global News that “Technology allowed a 767 to glide for 17 minutes from 40,000 feet, but it was human beings that landed it.”