On July 23, 1983, an Air Canada Boeing 767 pilot successfully landed the aircraft despite running out of fuel at an altitude of about 12,500 meters. The aforementioned Boeing 767 was on a flight from Montreal to Edmonton, and ran out of fuel about halfway through due to a miscalculation when filling its tanks.
Namely, at that time in Canada, the transition was made from the former imperial system of units of measurement, which uses gallons and pounds, to the metric system, which uses liters and kilograms. The aforementioned Boeing 767 was equipped with instruments that operated according to a new, metric system. When filling the tank in Montreal, the crew members miscalculated the required amount of fuel, so that less than half of the required amount was put into the aircraft.
They also entered the wrong data into the computer on the plane, which therefore could not warn them of the correct level in the tanks. At the mentioned altitude of 12,500 meters, both engines, one after the other, stopped working at the moment when the fuel was used up. Fortunately, the pilot of the aircraft, Captain Robert Pearson, had experience in flying gliders, which he took advantage of in those critical moments. The plane managed to land, with the help of a co-pilot and flight control, on the runway near the town of Gimli in the Canadian province of Manitoba.
It was the runway of the former air base, which was closed in the meantime, and at the time of the mentioned landing of the Boeing 767 it was partly in use as a motodrome. No one was injured in the landing, and the flight without the aircraft’s fuel lasted a total of about 17 minutes.
