Air Canada Flight 143 Glider's Suicide

Air Canada Flight 143 the Gimli Glider Accident Jennifer C. McCarthy Abstract Air Canada Flight 143 the Gimli Glider Accident Saturday morning, July 23, 1983, Captain Weir makes the flight to Montreal, Canada with no malfunctions. Once landed Captain Weir and Captain Pearson do an aircraft turnover with each other. Captain Pearson is now in charge and has the idea the aircraft has to be drip checked due to the fuel gauges being inoperative. While sitting in Montreal, a certified avionics technician category 38, Mr. Ouellet boards the flight deck to perform routine checks. As well as doing routine checks Mr. Ouellet verifies the previous certified aircraft technicians log book entry. He however becomes confused and decides to perform a built in test equipment check on the fuel processor. Before he does the test he resets the pulled breaker causing the fuel gauges to go blank. Not liking the results Mr. Ouellet removes the processor to order a new part. Upon discovering there is none available he returns to flight deck. Once here he is distracted by fullers and aircrew boarding thus forgetting to pull circuit breaker number
two again as noted in the logbook(Lockwood, 1985, p 26). So once Captain Pearson arrives on the flight deck and notices his fuel gauges are all blank, this is what he expected from the turnover with Captain Weir and as stated in the aircraft logbook. Upon investigation a combination of causes was determined to be the result of the accident.
Both flight crew and ground maintenance personnel, along with several human errors are to blame. Some include flying a jet against minimum equipment list provisions without fuel gauges, not properly trained on new metric fuel calculations, and not informing Captain Pearson fully on the problems with the fuel systems (Lockwood, 1985, p 36). One other big factor in this accident was a failure of communication. Air Canada held morning meetings to discuss major issues of the aircraft in its fleet. Only problem was these meetings are held only Monday thru Friday. Flight 143 was on Saturday. The cockpit was also crowded with a number of people during Captain’s departure preparations, which could have caused a major distraction(Williams, 2003, p
27). When testing the fuel processor it was discovered that it had a cold solder joint on the inductor between one coil wire and its terminal post. Upon later investigations it was determined the fuel processor had a design error and that was to blame. The processor failed to switch from the defective channel due to a power drop in the system, also to note was there had already been fifty five changes to the minimum equipment list within three months Air Canada started operating the Boeing 767(Williams, 2003, p 24). References Aviation safety network. (n.d.). Retrieved August 21, 2009, from http://aviation- safety.net/database/record.php?id=19830723-0 Canada weather. (July 23, 1983) Retrieved August 21, 2009, from www.climate.weatheroffice.ec.ga.ca Gimli glider. (n. d.). Retrieved August 21, 2009, from www.economic.expert.com/a/Gimli:Glider.html Lockwood, M. (April 1985) Final report of the board of inquiry. Retrieved September 1, 2009, from www.collectionscanada.gc.ca Williams, M. (2003) The one hundred fifty six tone gimli glider: Flight safety Australia, 22-27. Wikipedia gimli glider. (n. d.). Retrieved August 21, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_glider