“They don’t say anything if you’ve got more than one though, main tank, eh?” he said to Captain Pearson, as well as the flight engineer who had joined them. As the jumbo jet crossed the Canadian countryside at 41,000 feet, Copilot Quintal thumbed through the 767 handbook to ascertain the nature of the airplane’s problem. It was just after 8:00pm central time that the cockpit computer began its string of inexplicable beeps and warning lights. At 6:58pm they made a brief scheduled stopover in Ottawa, where engineers once again checked the fuel dripsticks- just to be safe. The airliner departed from Montreal at 5:48pm eastern time with their sixty-one passengers. Several independent dripstick checks later, the fuel hosers were satisfied that sufficient fuel was loaded, and they advised Air Canada Flight 143 to take off. The four-month-old 767 was a state-of-the-art machine with state-of-the-art glitches, and FQIS issues were becoming a common complaint. Rather than canceling the flight, Captain Pearson instructed the engineers to check the fuel level manually. Even worse, the component required to repair it could not be delivered until later that evening.
When pilots Pearson and Quintal had arrived for their shift earlier that day, they had been notified that the plane’s fuel gauges were non-functional due to a fault in the Fuel Quantity Indicator System (FQIS). The date was 23 July 1983, and although the fuel pressure warnings were not the flight’s first mechanical frustrations, they were certainly the most distressing so far. “Oh fuck,” Pearson lamented, “we’ve got to go to Winnipeg.” “You know,” he commented to Copilot Quintal, “I would not take this air…” He trailed off as the computer blurted out another four beeps, and the indicator panel lit up like a Christmas tree decorated with bad news. To his relief, the troubleshooting chart indicated that the situation was not as perilous as it might seem: the fuel pump in the left wing tank was signaling a problem, a minor issue considering that gravity would continue to feed the engines even if the pump failed. The mustachioed Captain Pearson pulled out the trusty Boeing handbook, his fingers dashing through the pages to find the specifics of the warning. “Something’s wrong with the fuel pump,” he reported. On the control panel, an amber low fuel pressure warning lamp lit up to punctuate the audio alarm.įirst Officer Maurice Quintal, copilot of Air Canada Flight 143, checked the indicator light to determine the cause of the computer’s complaints. Inside the cockpit of the cruising airliner, Captain Bob Pearson was understandably alarmed at the out-of-the-ordinary beeps that were chiming from his flight computer. Do not distribute or repurpose this work without written permission from the copyright holder(s).
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