Kevin's Blog

I have to say that it was nice of all of you to notice! Here is a sampling from my email inbox this morning...

"Dude, where's your blog?"

"Did Fox fire your ass?"

"Blogging. Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few."

"I guess your Texas victory celebration after the Fiesta Bowl prevented you from blogging!"

That last one was the most accurate, but still not exactly true! (I have such great friends!)

Technology is a wonderful thing, but when it fails, it can certainly lead to a number of problems, not the least of which is no blog post on Monday night. While I was struggling with technology, I recalled a story a dear friend recently shared with me.

The Gimli Glider.

If you are not aware of this 1983 aviation incident, check out this link. It is an amazing story of heroism and an inability to understand mathematics, units, and balance equations!

What is fascinating about the Gimli Glider episode is that despite the mathematical miscues, the weather provided a helpful, and likely life-saving hand. You always hear about weather causing aviation disasters, and these disasters have brought weather terms like 'wind shear' into the public consciousness. But weather, helping to save an aircraft? You never hear those stories...until now.

Gimli, located in Manitoba, is not one of your garden spots. Gimli gets 146 cm of snow (57.5 inches, I checked my units!) per year. Given that the Royal Canadian Air Force airbase at Gimli had been closed since 1971, if this flight had occurred anytime between September and May, the pilot would never have been able to identify the airstrip on which to make the emergency landing. It would have been covered in snow.

Gimli is also known for its frequent low cloud cover because of the proximity of Lake Winnipeg, but on the day of the incident, the weather was perfectly clear.

The shores of Lake Winnipeg are also known for their gusty, and frequently changing winds. The complex lake winds made Gimli an excellent training base for air force pilots under a variety of weather conditions, but not a good place for routine commercial aircraft operations. On July 22, 1983, the day of the incident, the local wind reports indicated light winds.

Air Canada photo of Flight 143 after emergency landing at Gimli

If you are bringing in a crippled 767 for an emergency landing, Murphy's Law suggests that you will get no cooperation from the weather. All of the air disaster movies I have ever seen suggest that!  However, on this day, everything Captain Pearson needed from the atmosphere to bring the 767 down safely worked in his favor.

Which is more than I can say for trying to get my original blog posted last night!!

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