The Gimli Glider was an event in aviation history, one that could have been a disastrous crash but through pluck, luck and skill ended happily - an Air Canada 767 ran out of fuel in the air and the crew successfully made a gliding landing at a place called Gimli in Manitoba.

However if you don't imagine a dwarf on a hang glider when you read that name I don't know what to do with you.

The Gimli Glider! So many things came together to make this safe landing:

• The co-pilot was a local and knew all the local airstrips
• ...including the decommissioned 10,000 foot military runway they ultimately chose as their destination
• ...but because it had been decommissioned, was now utilized by a local go-kart club for racing
• ...which, on that day, was indeed having a great time racing go-karts on the old runway
• ...and because there was no way to alert the people on the ground and the plane’s approach was utterly silent (NO ENGINES) with kids in go-karts were whizzing around on the runway, the final approach was, shall we say, alarming
• ...until a parent looked up and noticed a giant fucking airplane getting bigger and bigger
• OH GOD HE’S LANDING HERE
• Thus within seconds the whole area was cleared by frantic parents
• Plane lands perfectly, but without power they had to drop the gear via gravity and the nose wheel failed to lock into place
• Front gear collapses
• Plane screeches to a halt, and because they landed at a go-kart event pretty much every dad has a fire extinguisher, so they manage to extinguish the small fire caused by friction
• The only minor injuries were due to passengers jumping from the emergency exit slides, which dangled off the ground due to elevated tail height

If you have 27 spare minutes and want an excruciatingly detailed, technical breakdown of what happened as told by a real pilot, here’s the Mentour Pilot episode on the Gimli Glider.

I read an article about this back around 1990 and my favorite part was that, after landing and stopping, the pilots were reflexively going through the “crash landing” checklist, shutting down all the fuel pumps and lines to prevent a fire from spreading, until it dawned on them halfway through that they didn’t need to do those steps because the tanks were quite empty.

Some of the details above are wrong. For example, while Gimli did have a go-kart league, that was not the group using the runways that day. It was a car racing group. The races were over for the day, but they were having a cookout at the end of the runway. If the plane hadn't stopped in time (and there was doubt it would be able to) they would have plowed right into all the campers and trucks parked at the end of the runway.

If you're wondering "how did they run out of fuel?" it was a combination of like five things. The big ones were:
*Greater automation meant that there wasn't a flight engineer, and nobody had written out what of the flight engineers jobs needed to be kept and given to the pilot and copilot and which were simply unnecessary
*One of the computer chips monitoring the fuel level had malfunctioned and not been replaced
*Air Canada was in the middle of a transition period where some planes were using metric and some were using imperial, and there was confusion in the calculations for how much fuel they needed.

Look the best part of the whole thing for me is the coincidental involvement of a dwarf from Lord of the Rings