A Boeing flew 100 kilometres with no fuel in 1983

On 23 July 1983, an Air Canada Boeing 767 ran out of fuel at 12,500 metres and reached the ground gliding: seventeen minutes and more than a hundred kilometres without a single engine running. The mistake came from Montreal. It was the airline's first metric aircraft, and whoever worked out the load multiplied the litres by 1.77 —pounds per litre, the usual figure— instead of 0.803, the one for kilos. Nobody checked the sum twice.

Over Red Lake, Ontario, the left engine died; minutes later, the right one. Captain Robert Pearson flew gliders at weekends: he knew that machine still travelled twelve metres forward for every metre it dropped. First Officer Maurice Quintal did the maths and remembered Gimli, a closed air force base in Manitoba.

That runway had been a drag racing strip for years: it was Saturday, and there were races, cars and families on the tarmac. Pearson slipped the aircraft sideways to lose height —a glider manoeuvre, not an airline one— and put it down. The nose gear collapsed and a small fire caught at the nose, put out by the race mechanics with their own extinguishers.

There were 69 people on board: ten minor injuries coming down the slides and no deaths. The aircraft was repaired, flew for another twenty-five years and retired in 2008 with its nickname painted on the nose: Gimli Glider.