Air Canada Flight 143 Accident Report

Air Canada Flight 143, a Boeing 767-233, departed Montreal for Edmonton on 23 July 1983 with 69 passengers and crew. The aircraft ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet. Captain Robert Pearson, a former fighter pilot, glided the unpowered airliner 183 kilometers to an emergency landing at Gimli Industrial Park Airport in Manitoba with no fatalities. The root cause combined three elements: a faulty fuel-quantity indicator, incorrect manual measurements during refueling, and failure of ground and flight crews to catch the error. Canada was transitioning from imperial to metric units; the miscalculation left the aircraft with 22,300 kilograms of fuel instead of the required 36,285 kilograms. The incident changed fuel-quantity procedures industry-wide and shaped how organizations manage metric adoption.