Plot
Two airline pilots are experiencing a sudden loss of power in the two engines of their airliner due to a fuel pump failure, and end up crashing shortly afterwards. It is revealed that they were in a flight simulator. In complete disbelief that such a scenario could ever happen in real life, they protest to the examiner. He tells them that "It isn't a dream. It happened."
Flashback to a few years earlier, on July 23, 1983 at Dorval Airport in Montreal. The ground crews of Canada World Airways struggle to convert gallons into liters and pounds into kilograms, as they prepare to refuel a brand-new Boeing 767 bound for Edmonton. This is the first aircraft in the fleet to use the metric system and they are about to make a terrible conversion mistake. Meanwhile, Beth Pearson (Mariette Hartley) drives her husband, Captain Robert Pearson (William Devane), to the airport, unusually anxious about hosting her in-laws later that day. Elsewhere in Montréal, First Officer Maurice Quintal (Scott Hylands) reluctantly accepts to cover for an injured colleague, leaving behind his sick wife.
The two airmen feel uneasy about their 767 having an inoperative fuel gauge, but are somewhat reassured to see the ground crews measuring the quantity of fuel in the tanks: 20,345 kg, or so they believe, enough to take them to Vancouver. Their Flight Management Computer will constantly indicate the quantity aboard. After a delay, the passengers board flight 174, including Rick Dion (Winston Rekert), the airline's chief mechanic, as well as his wife and three-year-old boy.
After takeoff, Dion visits Pearson in the flight deck. Their conversation is suddenly interrupted by a series of beeps indicating a failure with one of the fuel pumps. After activating the cross-feeding valve between the tanks, the alarm stops. Later, another fuel pump fails. Quintal revises the notepad used by the ground crew in Montréal and discovers they have loaded 20,345 pounds instead of 20,345 kg, leading to a potential fuel exhaustion.
Pearson decides to divert to Winnipeg, much to the dismay of his passengers. The 767 is still far from that major airport, when suddenly, an alarm sounds, indicating a complete fuel exhaustion. It is followed by the failure of the two engines, and the complete shutdown of the glass cockpit until the ram air turbine kicks in and provides limited power to the instruments. The aircraft has become a giant glider. All the passengers start to appreciate what they believe are their last living moments.
Luckily, Pearson is a former glider pilot. Quintal suddenly remembers the presence of an abandoned airfield in Gimli and the crew decide to land there instead of attempting to reach Winnipeg or landing in water. Unknown to them, the airfield's abandoned runway is occupied by race cars and young cyclists, which they dodge all the way until touchdown. The nose landing gear collapses, yet the aircraft stops within a few meters of the end of the runway. Everyone survived.
Read more about this topic: Falling From The Sky: Flight 174
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“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)