Normally, you’d think an airline cockpit and the stuff that goes on within its confines rather dry material for a good meal with over 100 friends until you realize it’s no ordinary cockpit as it housed two extraordinary pilots who saved everyone on board a passenger jet whose engines cut out at 41,000 feet and sent the plane into a freefall.
The cockpit of the Gimli Glider, an Air Canada Boeing 767 jet that was carrying 61 passengers and eight crew between Montreal and Edmonton on July 23, 1983, and the two pilots working its controls have gone down in aviation history.
And the Gimli Glider Exhibit’s annual fundraising dinner on Sept. 6 at the Gimli Recreation Centre celebrated this most amazing feat of airmanship, as well as the return of the cockpit to Gimli where the museum plans to mount it at a commemorative park near the airport on land donated by the provincial government.
Capt. Bob Pearson, who was flying the commercial airliner on that fateful day 42 years ago, and the people who were there after he and co-pilot Maurice Quintal made an emergency landing on a former Royal Canadian Air Force base runway in Gimli, reminisced about the aviation emergency and their respective roles in what could have been a tragedy after a re-fuelling error between metric and imperial left the jet grossly short of gas required to complete its journey.
Capt. Pearson’s gliding skills were second to none as he manoeuvred the huge powerless airliner into a sideslip to reduce altitude and speed on his approach to the Gimli runway, which unbeknownst to him and Quintal (who knew of the runway’s existence from his RCAF training days) had been decommissioned and converted into a racetrack — and had a race underway as they descended.
They saved the day, though, along with the plane, which was flown out a few days later after Air Canada repaired it. But Capt. Pearson said he had no idea there was a battery under the cockpit’s floorboard that could have ignited after the landing with a collapsed nose gear. The focus of pilots on commercial airliners is flying the plane, not the inner components of it.
“I don’t know any airline pilot that does know [about disconnecting the battery]. Maybe pilots on small aircraft that are more intimate with maintenance. But we relied totally on maintenance for everything. Normally, as a pilot on a commercial airplane, you don’t even see maintenance,” said Capt. Pearson, who with his partner Pearl Dion — who was a passenger on board the flight and met Pearson years after the landing — are the most down-to-earth people you’re bound to meet and enjoy speaking to legions of Glider fans who are still mesmerized by the astonishing landing.
“As a pilot I would get on board about half an hour before departure. The fuelling would have been done before I got there and the maintenance work, too. We don’t even get to meet the people who fix our airplanes — you just trust them. You sign the log book authorizing the aircraft for flight. But I didn’t know about the battery. As Gary [MacGregor] said, the battery could have exploded and the airplane could have burned. That was a $60-million airplane back in 1983.”
It was Gimli’s fire chief Gary MacGregor who knew the battery had to be disconnected straightaway to prevent possible ignition.
MacGregor and his wife Paulette, who live in Gimli, became good friends with Capt. Pearson and Pearl Dion. They met Pearson years after the incident during after a coincidental encounter in eastern Canada where Pearson recognized MacGregor as the firefighter with the aircraft-battery knowhow. The two couples now regularly visit each other.
MacGregor joked that Pearson didn’t know how to operate the 767 and it was incumbent upon him to step in to save it. The first thing he did that day when he arrived at the scene with a pumper truck was “get in the cockpit” and ask the captain where the battery was located to which Pearson replied that he didn’t know.
“You have to disconnect the battery; that’s the source of heat. I met this guy here,” said MacGregor, gesturing to Capt. Pearson sitting beside him. “I said to him, ‘There should be a hatch in the floorboard.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, I think it’s here.’ So, we ripped up the carpet and we lifted the hatch and I got in there and disconnected the battery.”
How did MacGregor know the importance of disconnecting a plane’s battery? He used to build airplanes at the Saunders Aircraft company in Gimli and had also worked at Bristol Aerospace in Winnipeg.
“I had lots of experience with airplanes and I was taking my pilot’s licence,” said MacGregor, who has earned a number of prestigious honours for his service as a firefighter.
Retired RCMP officer, former Gimli Airport manager and commercial pilot Bob Munro said he had been on police duty that day when he was alerted by RCMP headquarters that a powerless passenger jet was on its way to Gimli.
“I remember when Capt. Pearson first touched down and the big timbers on the metal railing along the racetrack went flying through the air as he was hitting them and knocking them out of position,” said Munro.
The gliding manoeuvre Capt. Pearson executed to slow the plane and lose altitude was something he had been trained to do as glider pilot, said Munro, who used to tow up gliders for the Gimli Air Cadet flying program.
“But [to do that manoeuvre with] a plane that size is phenomenal. You don’t practise that with a 767. In small planes, I’ve done it hundreds of times. I would come in high and purposely drop down and, at the last minute, land on the ground,” said Munro. “Bob and Maurice didn’t have any hydraulics and couldn’t move the controls because they’re so massive. But a little arm with a propeller [a backup feature of the 767] wound up enough hydraulics so that they could get control of the airplane. Until the 767s, it wasn’t in airplanes. It was a new device called the RAT.”
The only thing lost that day was one shoe, said Munro. The RCMP recovered everyone’s belongings from the plane and took them to the passengers who had been housed and fed at the old Viking Hotel in Gimli.
“I was standing on a chair in a room with about 80 people, and I held up a set of false teeth and said, ‘We’ve got an item here. We’re not sure who it belongs to. But perhaps someone can identify it,’” said Munro. “And a lady in the back put up her hand.”
Pearl Dion recounted how it felt to be a passenger in the cabin as Pearson and Quintal dealt with the falling jet after the engines failed over Red Lake, Ont.
Dion said she had been travelling with her husband Rick Dion, a maintenance engineer with Air Canada who was off duty at the time and travelling as a passenger. The couple was flying with their three-year-old son, Chris. Rick went to visit Pearson and Quintal in the cockpit to talk about the brand new 767. When an audible warning in the cockpit went off, she said Rick “knew” they were out of gas.
“We just couldn’t believe [we survived]. Even Rick thought we were goners, that we were going to crash,” said Dion. “He couldn’t believe Bob could have landed that airplane.”
She and Chris had been watching a movie while Rick was in the cockpit, she said. Suddenly, everything went dark in the cabin. The crew told them to go back to their seats and started putting them through emergency procedures.
“You go into shock and you just don’t know what’s going on. We knew something was terribly wrong. When Rick came back to the seat, he knew we were out of gas,” she said. “I asked him, ‘What is the matter?’ … and he said, ‘We’re a little short of gas.’ I said, ‘How short?’ He said, ‘Just a little’ because he didn’t want to scare me.”
She said she and Pearson are “amazed everyone is still interested in the story” and that Pearson typically gets recognized wherever they travel.
Gimli Glider exhibit board member Glen Hooper drove to the Mojave Desert this summer to pick up the cockpit of the retired airliner and brought it back to Canada. The board purchased the cockpit with the help of a generous donor.
Hooper took questions from guests about his trip through the U.S., telling them about his ICE-free entry to Canada on June 27 with the cockpit in tow and some amusing stories along his 7,000-kilometre round-trip journey that took seven days.
“My first day driving back from Henderson, Nevada, just south of Las Vegas, I was fuelling up and a little kid maybe 11 or 12 says, ‘Look Mom, there’s the cockpit of the Space Shuttle that blew up over Texas,’” said Hooper. “So at I looked at the cockpit and thought that kid’s not that far off.”
What made the purchase of the cockpit possible was Winnipegger James Kotowich, who asked exhibit president Barb Gluck last year what her dream was in terms of the museum. When she told him it was buying the plane’s cockpit, he offered to pay 50 per cent of the cost.
Kotowich said the glider is an important piece of history that landed in Gimli’s backyard.
“This is an important piece of history not only for Gimli but the entire province and the world. This aircraft was landed by a man with great skill and who changed aviation throughout the entire world. When you’re learning to be a commercial pilot now, you’re taught how to land an aircraft like Capt. Pearson had to,” said Kotowich.
The board is “passionate” about the Glider and preserving its history, and Kotowich said he himself has a “real attachment” to the aircraft as his aunt worked at Air Canada as secretary to the one of the company’s vice-presidents.
“I did this for my aunt because she was proud of Air Canada. When this incident happened, she chewed her boss out because his reaction as an administrator was, ‘We’ll go with company lines.’ Capt. Pearson probably knows what I’m alluding to,” said Kotowich, referring to Air Canada’s having disciplined Pearson and Quintal for the ground crew’s fuel error. “She was mad at them because they didn’t support an Air Canada employee. There were an awful lot of pilots who demanded manual dipping of fuel tanks after that because they wanted to make sure this would never happen again … and they wanted to tell management this was not pilot error.”
Special guest speaker Brendan Yanta, director of systems operations at Perimeter Aviation, told dinner guests that pilots working the cockpit controls face a number of challenges when flying in Manitoba — which ironically is one of the best places to train as a pilot because of its flat terrain in the south.
The province’s challenges include temperature extremes, remotely located communities in the north, lack of infrastructure in the north with gravel runways, no air-traffic control, limited ground crew, lack of navigational lighting and wildlife on runways, as well as trouble finding enough pilots willing to fly the north.
“Northern Manitoba represents one of the most operationally demanding environments for commercial aviation. The region is divided by vast, sparsely populated landscapes contrasted by boreal forests or rugged rock formations, tundra and seemingly endless lakes and rivers,” said Yanta. “Within this isolated geography there are dozens of small communities, many of which have no year-round road access. For these communities, aviation is not a convenience or a means to a vacation or a business meeting but a critical lifeline. Many community services depend entirely upon air transportation.”
The dinner wrapped up with questions from the guests for Capt. Pearson and Pearl Dion, prize draws and remarks from Gimli Glider Exhibit president Barb Gluck.
Gluck thanked the provincial government for donating the land at the airport where the Gimli Glider cockpit will be mounted, as well as the exhibit’s board members and volunteers. She also thanked Kotowich for his donation and said she preferred to keep the total cost of the cockpit private.
