I want one.

Don’t ask me how I found this, but I want it. RTH says no, he’s a big meanie!* I think it would look awesome on our balcony

The Gimli Glider is a fairly infamous moment in aviation history. From an airlines perspective it is never good publicity when their planes fall out of the sky. People can forgive and forget mechanical problems or manufacturing issues caused by a factory many miles away, but they tend to get a bit upset when the pilot doesn’t put enough fuel in the plane. At least the AirTransat people put enough in to start with, even if they were careless enough to misplace it on the way.

I’d love to give you the link to the official report but wading through any webpage designed by a Canadian government agency is worse than swimming through molasses so you’ll have to make do with the Wikipedia page. Needless to say there were many factors that played a part in this crash, no pilot sets out in the morning and says “I think I’ll do this potentially dangerous thing today, ‘cause I fancy a bit of a crash!” Accidents are very rarely caused by one thing. Usually a chain of events escalates to the inevitable conclusion. Fear of flying notwithstanding, this is why I find crash investigations so interesting. Break one link and you stop the potential accident in its tracks.

One of the key players in the whole Gimli incident was a confusion between metric and imperial measurements. Boy do I feel their pain. I’ve blogged before about the god-awful mix of units that I have to deal with in Canadian aviation. It really does make my head hurt. I’m not use to being “bad with numbers” but every time I have to look back and check how may feet in a mile and if I’m meant to be using statute or nautical miles.

I spent a lifetime in the classroom drilling into the students “be consistent with units”- stick to kilograms, metres, and seconds. Stay with those and you can’t go wrong. Now I find myself contemplating an equation which somehow manages to combine inches of mercury, feet and degrees Celsius! Nice! Quite frankly I’m amazed this kind of stuff doesn’t happen more often.

Still want me a nice plane for my balcony though ;)

 *Only joking, honest!