Author's note: Yes, more Hetalia. What can I say, I'm addicted. Anyway, I couldn't resist retelling my favourite aviation incident through the eyes of my favourite character. This is a true story, feel free to look it up and get all the details. Credit to the show Mayday as my dialogue source.
Disclaimer: Hetalia is not mine, nor are the people featured here.
Rating: K (no swearing, no violence, just drama.)
Summary: It should have been a routine flight. Then the first warning sounded, and it quickly became anything but.
ooooooooooooooooooo
Air Canada 143
Matthew Williams gave a contented sigh as he flopped into his seat aboard the Boeing-767. Convincing his boss to give him a day off had not been easy, but a day of sight-seeing in Edmonton, Alberta would be just the thing to allieviate the stresses that came with being the personification of the country of Canada. Out the window, Matthew could see the bustling tarmac of Ottawa's airport. He smiled and hugged his tiny polar bear, Kumajiro, tightly as Air Canada 143 began to taxi out to the runway.
Soaring through the cobalt skies of late July, Matthew politely waved away a smiling stewardess and unfastened his seatbelt. The view from his window of the ground was magnificent, at a dizzying 26000 feet up, but his curiosity as to what the view from the cockpit might be like had got the better of him. Maybe the crew wouldn't mind, as long as he was very quiet and stayed out of the way. Ahead of him, an off-duty flight engineer was invited up to the flight deck, and Canada followed, making himself small and unobtrusive in the corner of the high-tech control room.
He hadn't been admiring the view out the wide windows for long when it happened. The flight engineer, captain, and first officer's conversation was interrupted by the bleating of an alarm that caught the attention of all three men and one nation present.
"Low fuel pressure? Why would that be?" First Officer Maurice Quintal sounded confused.
"Something's wrong with the fuel pump." Captain Robert Pearson responded, silencing the alarm.
But the low pressure warning, which had sounded for the forward pump, had only been quiet a few moments before the penetrating noise returned to declare the same problem had surfaced in a pump on the left side of the plane. In his corner, Matthew clutched Kumajiro worriedly as the captain checked his computer, then looked upwards at a set of gauges that had been marked as not working. The captain looked toward the visiting flight engineer, who suggested that the fuel might be low in the left tank.
"Let's head for Winnipeg. Now." Pearson barked, making Matthew jump. He personally didn't know much about planes, but two alarms and diverting to a different city two provinces short of their destination could not be good. At the controls, the captain was requesting the course change over the radio. All he told the ground control officer was there was a problem, but the tension in his voice was apparent. Canada squeezed the small bear tightly as more warnings sounded. Quintal was telling the cabin crew about the course change.
"I hope this is just false warnings." Silently, the small blonde seconded the captain's wish.
No such luck. Moments later, a new alarm sounded over the blaring fuel pump warnings. Matthew could see shock and dismay on the faces of the three men watching the instruments, then his own face paled as he heard: "Okay, we've lost the left engine." It was then he knew for certain that this routine flight would be anything but.
Hurriedly, the captain and first officer began to run through a checklist of their equipment. Behind them, the flight engineer, Rick Dion, looked upwards at the instruments on the roof. Matthew followed his gaze. The low fuel pressure warning was now flashing for the pump on the right-hand side of the aircraft, and with dread he realized they would shortly lose the right engine as well. The thought had barely formed in his mind before a loud bong'ing noise sounded amidst the blaring of the other alarms. Even as Pearson asked "what was that?" the right engine could be heard powering down to silence.
What followed next was even more terrifying. As the right engine lost power, the instrument panels went dark and unresponsive. The crew was confused, and Matthew could sense the fear both in the cockpit and behind them in the passenger cabin. Exchanging worried looks with Pearson, it was Quintal who radioed the ground.
"This is Air Canada 143. We just lost both engines."
From his corner, Matthew could see the fear on the faces of the three men. He wished he could do something, anything to help, but knew that all he could do was stay out of the way. Some back-up system had relit a handful of instruments, but as the crew conversed with the people on the ground the blonde knew this would not get them down alone. They would need a lot of luck and the grace of any Almighties out there to survive. In the cabin, he knew, the personnel would be explaining crash procedures to the 61 passengers. He contemplated leaving, but didn't dare do anything that might distract the two men at the controls.
"143, we have you at 65 miles from Winnipeg, 45 from Gimli," was finally heard from the controller. Now they knew where the plane was in the air above the woods and fields of Manitoba.
"We might make Winnipeg." The captain sounded hopeful, but as the first officer scratched rapid calculations on a piece of paper his expression was doubtful. After further conversation, it was decided to try for Winnipeg, both men knowing the bustling hub would be far safer in a possible crash than the decommissioned Air Force base at the town of Gimli. Matthew stared out the window at the approaching clouds, praying for the safety of 69 passengers and crew and wondering how a Boeing-767 could have run out of fuel only halfway into its planned flight.
More silence. More conversations with ground control. Another check of altitude and distance as Winnipeg airport became visible on the horizon. The blonde's violet eyes locked onto it as he sensed the millions of his citizens in the city beyond.
"Bob," Quintal's voice cut through the cockpit, "we can last maybe another 20 miles." Matthew squeezed his eyes shut in dismay. Winnipeg was still almost 40 miles ahead. Pearson grimaced, but quickly called the tower below, asking directions to the Gimli airstrip. 10 miles. They could make it that far. But they all knew getting there was only half the problem. Somehow, they still needed to land.
Dion, the flight engineer, said he needed to check on his family, slipping out of the cockpit. While the door was briefly open, the young nation sitting behind the pilot could feel the fear of the Canadian citizens beyond. With a nervous swallow he quietly claimed Dion's vacated seat at the engineering panel. Following the lead of Pearson and Quintal, he buckled himself in and held tight to Kumajiro as the bear wriggled nervously. Below, the ground was getting closer.
"Landing gear down." But not all of it. Matthew could see Quintal examining a light on the instrument panel labelled "nose." Only the back two sets of wheels had properly dropped. Nothing could be done now, though.
The runway at Gimli was in sight. Quintal was agitated. "We're going in too steep. Too fast."
But Pearson was calm. "I know."
Matthew had never worked much with planes after the world wars. Sure, he had flown on them hundreds of times, but he didn't know how to fly the gigantic metal birds of modern times. He knew, though, that the two men at the front of the plane did. He knew they had spent years in the air, and thousands of hours learning how to protect the lives their passengers entrusted to them. If the captain was calm, he must have a plan to get Air Canada 143 safely onto the ground.
"Well, I guess I'll just slip it."
No matter how crazy Quintal's expression suggested that plan might be.
Before he could wonder what slipping it meant, the maneuver was begun. The entire aircraft shook as Pearson forced the plane to obey two sets of simultaneous but conflicting instructions. They seemed to be falling sideways, was the impression Matthew got. He clung to his bear, eyes locked on the ground that was suddenly visible out the side window. The strange sideways-forward motion of the plane was having the desired effect, however, slowing their forward motion and dropping them toward the ground. Their destination, Gimli, Manitoba, was within reach.
With both engines gone, Air Canada 143 would only get one chance to attempt a landing. In the cockpit, Matthew's eyes widened as he saw cars clustered around the abandoned airstrip that had at some time been converted to a drag racing strip. In front of his seat, the captain and first officer made the same realization. As they plunged toward the runway, two children on bikes could be seen far ahead on the concrete strip. There was nothing anyone could do about that now, though.
The plane touched down heavily, the unsecured nose gear collapsing back into its hatch and sending the nose of the plane slamming down onto the ground, Momentum sent the massive aircraft barrelling down the runway, metal screaming on the concrete path and on the metal divider of the racing strip. Matthew clung to Kumajiro to prevent him from being tossed around the wildly shaking cockpit. Dimly, he noticed that the two children had panicked and were trying to outrun the plane. Smoke filled the cockpit.
Finally, everything was still.
It took a moment for realization to set in that the plane had stopped, that they hadn't crashed. Pearson and Quintal were running a hurried shut-down checklist in the smoky room. With a small smile of gratitude, Canada freed himself of the safety restraints and slipped out to join the 61 passengers and 6 cabin crew who were evacuating amidst lingering cheers. On the ground, he was relieved to see that the two cyclists had reached safety. A few minor injuries in the evacuation were dismissed in the euphoria of survival.
The captain and first officer emerged with a fire extinguisher, which they began to spray around the smouldering point of contact between the ground and the nose of the plane. They were shortly joined by men from the dragway's pits, and the fire was quickly extinguished. Standing off to one side, Canada held Kumajiro and watched happily as the passengers and crew mingled with local families, celebrating the miraculous landing.
The event was all over the news within hours, and Matthew spent the day fielding frantic phone calls from his boss, and from the nations he considered family (Arthur Kirkland, AKA England, Francis Bonnefoye, AKA France, and Alfred F. Jones, AKA America.). Between those calls he pestered his country's Transportation Safety Board to find the reason for the accident. It was vital to find the cause before a repeat incident could occur, because he knew that another plane would not be so lucky. It had been Pearson's experience with gliders that saved them, the news said. That, and sheer dumb luck.
When the official report came back, he was all the more concerned, and all the more grateful that chance had placed captain Pearson at the helm of Air Canada 143 that day. The problem had been an error in converting the volume of fuel in the trucks to the weight on of fuel on the plane, caused by his nation's recent switch from Imperial to Metric. One pound was roughly hald a kilogram, and so a series of errors had caused the plane to leave Montreal for Ottawa with only half the fuel it should have had to complete its trip to Edmonton. It could have happened to any aircraft, with any number of passengers and any pilot in control, but fate had allowed the fateful flight to be placed in the hands of someone who could land it safely, and for that Canada was grateful.
Two years later, Matthew watched as Pearson and Quintal became the first to receive a prestigious award for the actions. And in 2008 he saluted the airplane as Pearson and Quintal landed it for the last time at Mojave Airport, ending flight 143's 25 years of service. But her nickname, Canada knew, would live on. People would remember the tale of the Gimli Glider.