Do not accept a "higher authority" decision about what you can and cannot accept when assuming the responsibility for the safe conduct of a flight. It was an act of remarkably poor judgment which, to Pearsons likely relief, was completely overshadowed by the events which followed. Fortunately for all concerned, one of [the captain's] skills is gliding. Captain Pearson would later remark that the boys were so close that he could see the looks of sheer terror on their faces as they realized that a commercial airliner was bearing down on them. I would give them an award for outstanding stick and rudder skills but then I would take away their licenses for very poor airmanship. Gulf Air Flight 072 (GF072/GFA072) was a scheduled international passenger flight from Cairo International Airport in Egypt to Bahrain International Airport in Bahrain, operated by Gulf Air.On 23 August 2000 at 19:30 Arabia Standard Time (), the Airbus A320 crashed minutes after executing a go-around upon failed attempt to land on Runway 12. When Captain Pearson and his First Officer Maurice Quintal arrived in the cockpit minutes later, they found the fuel gauges blank, which was, coincidentally, exactly what they had expected. 23 July 1983: Air Canada Flight 143 was a Boeing 767-200, registration C-GAUN, enroute from Montreal to Edmonton, with a stop at Ottawa. The 767 was only the second model operated by Air Canada which did not have a flight engineer, and it emerged that the reallocation of this responsibility was never properly completed. Air Canada also flies to a number of international destinations located all over the globe, including the U.S., Asia, Europe, and the South Pacific. All that remained were a few basic analog backups: a standby attitude indicator, an altimeter, an airspeed indicator, and a magnetic compass. The fact that Flight 143 took off from Montreal on July 23, 1983 with blank fuel gauges was a significant cause of the accident. Time went by so fast during my stay. before listening to me. At 1:21 p.m., over Red Lake, Ontario, the 767 ran out of fuel and both engines . In any case, someone should have been trained in the proper technique, but nobody was. replaced through, I was so excited to go home after my three month stay in Chile. In fact, the performance of this crew in Crew Resource Management and Situational Awareness was superb from the moment they suspected they were out of fuel, all the way through the successful emergency landing, passenger evacuation, and aircraft fire fighting. The pilots briefly considered a 360-degree turn to reduce speed and altitude, but decided that they did not have enough altitude for the maneuver. Needless to say, even with knowledge of these previous events, Captain Pearson should still have questioned the idea that Maintenance Central would let a plane fly with blank fuel gauges. Flight 261 had crashed killing 88 people on board; while the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was reporting that the potential cause of the crash was due to a lack of regular airplane maintenance. This was exactly what Pearson needed. None of the 61 passengers was seriously hurt. After completing a sweeping turn to the right, Gimli airbase hove into view, just beyond the sandy shores of the lake. What exactly was said during this discussion was a matter of some dispute, but Captain Pearson got the impression that not only had the fuel gauge fault been present since the plane left Toronto on the 22nd, but that the gauges themselves had been blank throughout this period as well. Pearson would later argue that a mechanic told him that the plane was declared fit for service by Maintenance Central, while the rest of those present, including First Officer Quintal and engineers Ouellet and Bourbeau, did not mention having discussed the contents of the MEL at all. It was a story which seemed to be Hollywood-ready, with so many grandiose details and twists of fate and fortune that it in fact made for rather campy, melodramatic cinema, as moviegoers discovered when the events of flight 143 were adapted to the silver screen in 1995. One gauge is for the centre auxiliary tank, one for the left main tank and one for the right main tank. Contact me via @Admiral_Cloudberg on Reddit or by email at kylanddempsey@gmail.com. In the meantime, C-GAUN continued to fly with its own malfunctioning processor. Knowing that Lockwood possessed the power to recommend prosecution, all of those involved would have been incentivized, and probably were also advised by their lawyers, to avoid admitting any egregious errors. A further conversion from liters to kilograms would then be required to provide the fuel quantity to the pilots, who were much more concerned with the weight of the fuel than its volume. U/S SUSPECT PROCESSOR UNIT AT FAULT P.N. 23 July 1983 New Boeing 767 Scheduled Montreal to Edmonton Flight Fuel exhausted mid-flight Uploaded on May 20, 2012 Dean Cael + Follow fuel damaged channel Normally a low fuel warning would have illuminated to warn them when they had 45 minutes of fuel left, but it never came on, because the warning system received its fuel quantity information from the same faulty processor as the fuel gauges. In any case, regardless of what was said or not said, Pearson had gotten the impression that the plane had been flying without fuel gauges since yesterday, and that if this was the case, then somebody with more authority than him must have authorized it. The crew is able to glide the aircraft. Air Canada Flight 143, commonly known as the Gimli Glider, was a Canadian scheduled domestic passenger flight between Montreal and Edmonton that ran out of fuel on Saturday, July 23, 1983, [1] at an altitude of 41,000 feet (12,500 m), midway through the flight. Although the worst of the danger was past, a number of factors complicated the evacuation, not least among them a smoldering fire under the cockpit, where sparks had ignited insulation material. However, this was simply not true the MEL in the cockpit was the same as the one used by Maintenance Central, and this MEL was the final authority on whether or not the plane was legal to operate. my previous article on Airwork flight 23. To have the maximum range and therefore the largest choice of possible landing sites, he needed to fly the 767 at the best glide speed. Overview. . Recognizing that he was facing a serious emergency, Captain Pearson immediately decided to divert to the nearest major airport. Like Yaremko, he decided that the processor needed to be replaced, but found none in stock. On June 2, 1983, the aircraft developed an in-flight fire behind the washroom that spread between the outer skin and the inner dcor panels, filling the plane with noxious, toxic smoke. On July23, 1983, Flight 143 was cruising at 41,000 feet (12,000m) overRed Lake, Ontario. Two years later both were awarded the first ever Fdration Aronautique Internationale Diploma for Outstanding Airmanship. Instead of having 22,300 kilograms of fuel, they had 22,300 pounds (10,100 kilograms). On July 23, 1983, flight 143 was cruising at 41,000 feet (12,000 m) over Red Lake, Ontario. And in any case, this was but one of several elements without any one of which the accident would not have occurred. Pearson decided to execute aforward slipto increase drag and lose altitude. The pilots of flight 143, for instance, certainly didnt understand the internal architecture of the fuel quantity processor, even though such knowledge would have helped them deduce that the gauges shouldnt be blank. Europes Dramatic Landscape It started when the maintenance crews for Air Canada Flight 143 discovered a shoddy soldering job had knocked out the computer that calculates how much fuel was needed to get the plane from. With both engines stopped, the system went dead, leaving only a few basic battery-powered emergency flight instruments. Upon reviewing the logbook, Pearson noticed Yaremkos entry, which stated FOUND FUEL QTY IND. The vertical speed indicator had ceased operations along with most of the other instruments, forcing First Officer Quintal to instead calculate their descent angle manually using their altitude and the distance from Winnipeg across several regular intervals. While these provided sufficient information with which to land the aircraft, a vertical speed indicatorthat would indicate the rate at which the aircraft was descending and therefore how long it could glide unpoweredwas not among them. Book Now. Unbeknownst to Quintal or to the air traffic controller, a part of the facility had been converted to a race track complex, now known asGimli Motorsports Park. As for the pilots, both learned valuable lessons and got on with their lives. An interesting side note. Fuel exhaustion due to problems during refueling, Ottawa MacdonaldCartier International Airport. At the time of the accident, Quintal had only 75 hours on the 767, and Pearson had no more than a couple hundred hardly enough to gain the kind of systems knowledge which would have helped them prevent the accident. He didnt normally need to know this, since his job was to pump fuel until the pilots told him to stop. Even though, the accident happened on the ground, but the plane broke into 2 parts and erupted into flames (Marketeer, 2002). He used the altitude from one of the mechanical backup instruments, while the distance traveled was supplied by the air traffic controllers in Winnipeg, measuring the distance the aircrafts echo moved on their radar screens. As the Gimli pilots were to experience on their landing approach, a decrease in this forward speed means a decrease in the power available to control the aircraft. Nevertheless, even after the accident, some cases continued to be reported in which Maintenance Central attempted to dispatch a plane which was not in compliance with the MEL. A few moments after the crew silenced the left-side fuel pressure alarm, a second fuel pressure alarm sounded for the right engine. The primary ingredient in airmanship, after all, is judgement. Some passengers disembarked, others boarded, and a mechanic fiddled with the fuel gauges again. This required pulling out a stick in the underside of each fuel tank, which would indicate the depth of the fuel in centimeters. He did praise the maintenance department for holding daily meetings to discuss every deferred defect on every Air Canada airplane, ascertaining why each had been deferred and what was being done about it, but he noted that the meetings had a fatal flaw they werent held on weekends, and flight 143 was scheduled on a Saturday. Some countries, such as Australia, nevertheless insisted that the 767 must have a flight engineer, but most recognized that the third crewmember was unnecessary. AC143 (Air Canada) - Live flight status, scheduled flights, flight arrival and departure times, flight tracks and playback, flight route and airport. Source: [Final Report of the Board of Inquiry into Air Canada Boeing 767 C-GAUN Accident, Part III]. _________________________________________________________________. They had only a matter of minutes to decide before they would be forced to commit to one airport or the other. them to climb up. The 767s fuel gauges, located on the overhead panel between the two pilots, display the weight of the fuel in the planes left, right, and center fuel tanks. All three fuel gauges operated normally. As humans are wont to do, their instinct was to try to outrun the plane rather than dodging to one side, forcing Pearson to brake even harder. He was pretty quiet, but he told me that he was ready to get back to his home in New York. When it entered orbit again it exploded and fell in Nacogdoches. Part of the decommissioned runway was being used to stage the race. Captain Pearson was an experiencedgliderpilot, so he was familiar with flying techniques almost never used in commercial flight. Many passengers elected to use the overwing exits instead, even though the slides there were never deployed, since the flight attendants apparently did not know where they were the accident in fact predated comprehensive aircraft conversion training for flight attendants in Canada, and they were more used to the exit configuration on the 747. 2840563 NIL STOCK. But before he could get any farther, he was called back out of the aircraft to help perform the drip check in the process, forgetting to return the circuit breakers to their original positions. Before I went to America, I had a large quantity of things to prepare: do researches about universities in the United States, write documents to apply to a university, get a visa so that I could go to America legally, and so on. But how many kilograms were there in 7,682 liters of fuel? A little bit of critical thinking would have set off alarm bells after all, fuel is less dense than water, and one liter of water weighs one kilogram, so logically one liter of fuel should weigh less than one kilogram. Here Lockwood had to note that while it was unclear who actually did the math, it didnt really matter, because neither pilots nor ground engineers at Air Canada were taught how to do manual fuel calculations or how to perform drip stick tests. As a result of the failure of the fuel gauges aboard C-GAUN on July 5th, Air Canada requested the return of the fuel processor from France, but when it arrived, it was found to be faulty, and was sent to Honeywell for repairs, where it would remain until January 1984. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. He also recommended rewording several manuals and documents; standardizing the fuel weight units across the Air Canada fleet; using circuit breaker inoperative tags that would prevent the breaker from being reset; establishing a flight safety organization within Air Canada; improving fueling procedures; and quite a large number of other very detailed suggestions, of which he was pleased to note that most were already implemented by the time he published his final report in 1985. They used the same factor to compute 8,703 / 1.77 = 4,916 liters of fuel to fly the trip. Upon arriving, he noted Yaremkos log entry, as well as the pulled circuit breaker. 1- Fuel exhaustion due to maintenance error. Air Canada arranged for United Airlines to supply a replacement processor in San Francisco, but before the new processor could be installed, the old one started working again, and the plane returned to Canada without any repairs having been made. 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