Every single day, over 100,000 flights take place up in the skies between cities all across the world.

Right now, as you're watching this video, there's probably about 5000 or so planes full of people flying over just the United States alone.

Flying by airplane is by far the safest possible way for you to travel anywhere today in the 21st century.

But accidents do still happen.

Sometimes, if you're driving your car on the way toe work and you run out of gas, you may just have to pull over and push it or hitchhike over to the nearest gas station.

But when you run out of gas on your plane while you're in the middle of flying it, your options are all pretty much equally shit.

And that's exactly the situation that the crew of Air Canada Flight 143 faced back on July 23rd, 1983 the day before their plane was flown from Toronto to Edmonton and received its routine maintenance checks on the morning of the 23rd the plane was flown from Edmonton over to Montreal, where the old crew got swapped out for our new crew.

That takes part in this story, including captain Robert Pearson with over 15,000 hours of flight experience and First Officer Maurice Contol with over 7000 hours.

It's important to note that at the time Canada was in the middle of converting from barbarian imperial units over to the glorious metric system for their aviation industry.

But Air Canada had so far on, Lee began using the metric system on their brand new 767 planes, which, of course, Air Canada Flight 1 43 was one of every other plane.

Besides the 7 67 in the Air Canada fleet were still using imperial units, and this caused a bit of confusion on the part of the refueling team who were instructed toe load up the plane with 22,300 kg of fuel.

Unfortunately, they filled up the plane with £22,300 of fuel instead, which was only about half of the fuel that they needed to reach Edmonton.

The flight crew approved the fuel without noticing the air took off and didn't even think about it until they were 41,000 ft high up in the air and an alarm went off, signaling that they're left.

Engine had quit working.

They were only about halfway through their trip to Edmonton, and with only one engine working, they decided to divert to nearby Winnipeg for an emergency landing.

Unfortunately for them, though, quickly after the left engine went out, the right engine followed suit and died as well.

This was, of course, because their plane had run out of fuel 41,000 ft high up in the sky.

And with the loss of power to the engines came a loss in electricity for the entire plane, which shut off most of the instrument panels inside of the pilot's cockpit.

Captain Pearson and First Officer Contol.

We're now responsible for somehow getting all 61 of their passengers and crew on board to safety without any fuel and with only very basic instruments, and they knew that they didn't have much time.

The first thing they did was to frantically searched through their on board emergency checklist for the section about flying a plane with both engines out.

But they quickly discovered that that section just didn't exist.

This situation had never been covered before in their flight simulator training and Air Canada.

Corporate had just assumed that an incident like this would never happen, so nobody was really prepared for it.

Luckily for everybody on board, Captain Pearson also just happened to be an experienced glider pilot and decided to do the Onley logical thing.

Glide the plane down to a super serious emergency landing somewhere.

Unfortunately for everybody on board, neither of the pilots had access to a vertical speed indicator, which indicates the rate at which the aircraft is descending.

This meant that the pilots didn't know with certainty how long they could continue gliding for before the plane inevitably smashed into the ground.

Captain Pearson made his best guess as to what the optimal gliding speed for the plane waas around 250 MPH.

At first, Officer contol began frantically calculating if they could still reach their intended emergency landing spot at Winnipeg, using the mechanical backup instruments on board to figure out their altitude and measuring that against the distance traveled that they were traveling, provided by air traffic control and he figured out that they had dropped 5000 ft in altitude in Onley 10 nautical miles of gliding, which meant that Winnipeg was too far away.

Thinking quickly, Comptel suggested that they land at an old, decommissioned Royal Canadian Air Force base at Gimli, where he used to serve as a pilot.

Captain Pearson and air traffic control all agreed on the plan, but unknown toe, all of them the former Air Force base had since been converted into a race track, and at the time of their crisis, a race was in the middle of being hosted there.

And part of the decommissioned runway was being used as a drag strip as they were getting close to the old runway that's now a drag strip.

They used a gravity dropped to force the landing gear down without using any power.

It became apparent that they were coming in too high and too fast, but they decided that they had no other choice, and they surged ahead anyway.

There were a few things that made their landing extremely difficult, though first, without any engines working, their plane was making almost no noise.

And so people on the ground at the racetrack had no warning of their sudden landing.

Second, their nose wheel had failed to lock into place during the gravity drop.

And third, the plane had automatically deployed a wind turbine on the side of the plane to provide power for the hydraulic steering system.

Since the main engines were dead as long as wind was blowing and causing the turbine blades to spin, they had good ability to steer.

But as they slowed down on their approach, the blades on the turbine span slower, which generated less power, which caused the plane to be increasingly more difficult to steer and control.

The slower that they went, but to almost miraculous other things happened that saved them from disaster.

First was the nose wheel actually failing toe lock into position As soon as the wheels of the plane touched down on the runway, Captain Pearson braked really hard and the nose wheel collapsed and was forced back up into its well.

That caused the nose of the aircraft to smash into the ground, bounced back up and then finally scrape across the ground.

He added friction of this help to slow the airplane down even Mawr and kept it from veering off into the crowd surrounding the plane on either side.

Pearson also applied an extra right break, which caused the main landing gear to straddle a guard rail that had been placed in the center of the runway, which created even Mawr Extra drag.

Finally, Air Canada flight 143 safely came to a complete stop on the ground 17 minutes after they first lost their fuel and had their engines shut down.

Nobody on board the plane or on the ground was seriously injured and following an internal investigation by Air Canada captain Pearson was demoted for six months and First Officer Comptel was suspended for two weeks for allowing the whole thing to happen in the first place.

However, they did successfully appealed their suspensions and they rewarded the first ever diploma for outstanding airmanship by the F A I.

Because of the incident.

They both continue toe work his pilots for the rest of their careers without another major incident taking place, and the 7 67 plane itself continued in service for Air Canada until it was finally retired in 2008.

Almost 25 years later, the lesson from the whole story is, is that bad math can kill you, but good math afterwards can still save you.

Basically, if everybody just knew how to use conversions and math properly beforehand, this entire thing would never have happened in the first place.

Unfortunately for them, the Internet and brilliant didn't exist back then to teach them these skills.

But luckily for you today, brilliant makes learning math easy and fun.

If you want to understand more about things like algebra, geometry or calculus that were important in this scenario, the best way to learn and understand is by applying them yourself.

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