The Gimli Glider: How a Boeing 767 Ran Out of Fuel at 41,000 Feet

You're cruising comfortably at 41,000 feet in a brand-new commercial airliner when the engines die, the cockpit goes silent, and the screens go black. You are now sitting inside a 150,000-pound metal tube that has just become a glider, in a scenario so unexpected that Boeing never even wrote a procedure for it.This episode tells the incredible true story of Air Canada Flight 143, the Gimli Glider, which ran completely out of fuel midair in 1983. It's a fascinating study of how tiny compounded human errors can defeat millions of dollars of technology, and how rare analog human skills became the only thing that could save the day.The fatal chain of errors: a faulty fuel sensor, a missing flight engineer role, and a botched metric conversion using pounds per liter instead of kilogramsHow the crew ended up loading less than half the fuel they needed while the flight computer trusted their bad mathThe ram air turbine that gave them just enough hydraulic steering after all power was lostCaptain Pearson's glider-pilot forward slip maneuver to drop altitude onto a runway that had become a racetrackThe collapsed nose wheel and center guardrail that serendipitously braked the jet feet from kids on bicycles, with zero serious injuries