While what’s left of one of Canada’s most famous commercial aircraft sits deteriorating in a California airplane boneyard, a Welland man has been working diligently for the past seven years to bring a replica of that plane’s flight deck to life.
The plane – a Boeing 767-200 being operated by Air Canada – became famous when its crew, led by pilot Captain Bob Pearson, ran out of fuel while on route to Edmonton on July 23, 1983. Unable to reach the nearest airport in Winnipeg, Pearson instead used all his skill to safely land the plane – without fuel and operating as a glider – on a landing strip at a former Royal Canadian Air Force base in Gimli, Man., which had been converted into a drag race facility. Complicating matters, an event was going on at the track at the time but miraculously no one was hurt, either on board the plane or on the ground.
The incident caught the attention of Perry Van Veen, who has always had an interest in aviation.
“In fact, my dream was to be an airline pilot one day and so back then I was working on my pilot's license,” Van Veen said.
It was a fueling mixup that put the pilots of AC 143 and its 60 passengers in the perilous predicament. Four decades ago, the 767 was a new aircraft (it had only been flying for a year in 1983) and with Canada’s changeover to the metric system, an incorrect conversion from gallons to litres left the airplane with not enough fuel for the flight.
“I remember watching it on the six o'clock news, and being so fascinated by it, and by the real skill that the pilot had and being able to land it,” Van Veen said. “He only had one chance to do it.”
Van Veen remained fascinated by the incident, and in 2017 he decided to turn this interest into something more tangible. It was then that he set about creating a replica of the plane’s cockpit. Now, seven years later, the project is moving closer to completion. He still needs to find a yoke for the captain’s controls and other, smaller bits and pieces before he brings an end to what has become a labour of love.
The goal is to hopefully donate the replica to an aviation museum – Van Veen has had interest shown in the project by a museum in Edmonton – so visitors can get feel for what Pearson and copilot First Officer Maurice Quintal faced that day.
“Visitors can come and look at the space and kind of be immersed in that space and feel like know what it like to be in the cockpit,” Van Veen said.
The 767 was one of the first airliners to use what Van Veen called “a glass cockpit” that featured digital display screens in addition to the regular set of analogue instruments.
“And it was the first aircraft to have a two-man crew, because before them aircraft of that size and that time had three crew members,” Van Veen said. “So, they were able to save by cutting down the two crew members and eliminate the flight engineer.”
Looking at the instrument panel of the replica, Van Veen said that it appears the way the crew would have seen it that day. The digital displays would have gone dark, and Pearson would have had to rely solely on the analogue gauges to check on the plane’s flying status, including airspeed and altitude.
Accuracy is important to Van Veen as he continues his work on the replica.
“I want it to be accurate to 99 per cent,” he said. “I'm very happy with the accuracy that I achieved in this because what you see is what you would have seen on the Gimli Glider back then in 1983.”
Many 767-200s remain in service today as cargo planes, Van Veen said.
As for Van Veen, he did eventually get his licence to fly. While he never flew the big jets as was once his dream, he did get a lot of time at the controls of a 10-seat twin-engine Piper and worked for several years as a flight instructor. These days his work is more grounded in the human resources sector.
The experience of flying his own aircraft has given him an idea of what the crew on the Gimli Glider faced.
“You're always doing calculations in your head, always thinking, okay, how far approximately am I from the field? Where I'm going to land? Then it’s what's my height? Do I have to lose height? I might too high or am I too low? Those are all the things that are going through your head at the time.”
He is in possession of the yoke that was used by Pearson on the plane but said he wants to keep that in his own collection and not use it in the replica.
“That will be staying with me.”
There is a museum in Gimli that details the incident and includes some artifacts from the plane. It may be found online at www.gimliglider.org. The incident was also a depicted on the Discovery TV show Mayday. The episode, part of season five, originally aired on May 14, 2008. The episode may be viewed here.
