Famous event in gliding circles from 30 years ago.
Residents in the small town of Gimli, Manitoba, are celebrating today to mark 30 years since a Boeing 767 airliner made an emergency landing there after running out of fuel. While not widely known in the U.S, the story of the “Gimli Glider” and its captain, Robert Pearson, is part of Canadian lore. On July 23, 1983, Pearson and his co-pilot Maurice Quintal tapped their most elemental piloting skills to guide the nearly 100-ton airliner on a powerless descent from more than 26,000 feet to a decommissioned Royal Canadian Air Force base.
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Pearson’s jet was on its way from Ottawa to Edmonton when both engines quit. The ground crew, having teething pains with conversion to the metric system, had loaded it with fuel measured in pounds instead of kilograms. So it ran out roughly halfway through its planned route. After deciding Quintal calculated they could not make the glide to Winnipeg, they diverted, with the help of air traffic controllers, to the old Gimli base.
The pilots found they were too high as they neared the runway, so Pearson performed a forward slip, a maneuver that causes the plane to skid sideways and lose altitude quickly without increasing speed. Pilots do this often in small planes but never in airliners but Pearson had to because the wing flaps and speed brakes normally used for slowing down didn’t work without power from the engines.
“When something like that happens, you just have to call on all of your training and experience,” Pearson said. Luckily his experience included years of towing gliders in a Piper Super Cub, a two-seat light plane that is as primitive as the 767 is high-tech.
“After releasing the glider I would have this long tow line hanging under the plane, and I had to be careful not to snag it on the farmer’s fence as I approached the runway. So I would stay high until I cleared the fence, and then did a steep slip to make the runway,” he said.
