Gimli Glider
Items like this make history fun:
Gimli Glider is the nickname of an Air Canada aircraft which was involved in an infamous aviation incident. On 23 July 1983, a Boeing 767-200 jet, Air Canada Flight 143, ran completely out of fuel at 41,000 feet (12,000m) altitude, about halfway through its flight from Montreal to Edmonton. The crew was able to glide the aircraft safely to an emergency landing at Gimli Industrial Park Airport, a former airbase at Gimli, Manitoba.
The subsequent investigation revealed corporate failures and a chain of minor human errors which combined to defeat built-in safeguards, deceiving Captain Robert Pearson into accepting an aircraft that should never have been flown. In addition, fuel loading was miscalculated through misunderstanding of the recently adopted metric system.
Can you imagine Pearson addressing the passengers? “The sound you are hearing is silence… and it is due, in large part, to the engines of the aircraft not running. It appears as though we have run out of fuel.” The things he went through, though, to get the thing safely landed are pretty unbelievable:
While they attempted to restart the engine and communicate with controllers in Winnipeg for an emergency landing, the warning system sounded again, this time with a long “bong” that no one present could recall having heard before. This was the “all engines out” sound, an event that was never simulated during training. Seconds later, most of the instrument panels in the cockpit went blank as the right side engine also stopped, and the 767 lost all power.
I think “terrifying” is a pretty good description. The story gets better:
The pilots immediately searched their emergency checklist for the section on flying the aircraft with both engines inoperative, only to find that no such section existed. However, Captain Pearson was an experienced glider pilot. This gave him familiarity with some flying techniques almost never used by commercial pilots. He realized that, in order to reduce their rate of descent as much as possible, he needed to fly the 767 at a speed known as the “best glide ratio speed”. He flew the aircraft at 220 knots (407 km/h), his best guess as to this airspeed.
Read the rest of the Wikipedia article for the amazing conclusion, wherein the aircraft skids to a stop in order to miss running down crowds at an auto racing track.