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
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