You’re cruising comfortably at 41,000 feet in a brand-new commercial airliner when the engines die, the cockpit goes silent, and the screens go black. You are now sitting inside a 150,000-pound metal tube that has just become a glider, in a scenario so unexpected that Boeing never even wrote a procedure for it.

This episode tells the incredible true story of Air Canada Flight 143, the Gimli Glider, which ran completely out of fuel midair in 1983. It’s a fascinating study of how tiny compounded human errors can defeat millions of dollars of technology, and how rare analog human skills became the only thing that could save the day.

• The fatal chain of errors: a faulty fuel sensor, a missing flight engineer role, and a botched metric conversion using pounds per liter instead of kilograms
• How the crew ended up loading less than half the fuel they needed while the flight computer trusted their bad math
• The ram air turbine that gave them just enough hydraulic steering after all power was lost
• Captain Pearson’s glider-pilot forward slip maneuver to drop altitude onto a runway that had become a racetrack
• The collapsed nose wheel and center guardrail that serendipitously braked the jet feet from kids on bicycles, with zero serious injuries