S Sanjai Kumar retweetledi
43 years ago, at 41,000 feet in the air, a brand new passenger plane carrying 69 people went completely silent.
Both engines died at the exact same time. The massive jet had just run out of fuel mid-flight.
The reason was a simple math mistake caused by a confusing transition. Canada was right in the middle of switching to the metric system. This specific plane was the very first one in the airline's fleet to use kilograms. The ground crew was still used to the old system. They calculated the fuel weight in pounds. The plane took off with less than half the fuel it needed to make the trip.
What happened next should not have been survivable.
The captain happened to fly small, unpowered gliders as a hobby. He had to do something no one had ever done with a commercial jet. He flew the heavy, powerless plane like a giant paper airplane toward an old abandoned military runway his co-pilot remembered.
Neither of them knew the old base had been turned into a public car track.
Neither of them knew there was a family racing event happening right on the asphalt that afternoon. Go-karts, cars, and kids on bicycles were directly in their path.
The plane came down completely silently. There was no loud engine noise to warn the people below.
The pilot forced the plane to drop out of the sky sideways just to slow it down. He came in fast. The front wheels collapsed when they hit the runway. The nose of the plane scraped across the concrete, throwing sparks everywhere until the huge jet skidded to a halt. The back end was sticking three stories up in the air.
Nobody on the ground was hit. Every single one of the 69 people on board walked away.
When airlines later put other pilots in simulators to try and copy the landing, every single one of them crashed.
The plane was repaired and flew for another 25 years.
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