GB wrote:

Hmmmmm - laymans terms eh? Let's see...

The *mustachioed* Captain Pearson pulled out the *trusty*
*Boeing* handbook, his fingers *dashing* through the pages....

Presumably dashing like Heathcliffe across the moors towards
his beloved Cathy - FFS where are you when we need you Emily
Bronte?

.......... 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.......

Blurted beeps???

.......... the ever-present vibrations in the deck were
disrupted by an almost imperceptible shudder, and the
white-noise hum of the remaining jet engine faded away with
a long and melancholy mechanical sigh........



Jesus wept! Like the 767 itself the purple prose plunges
ever earthward.

The gauges and monitors of the control panel– which had been
so *animated* with *anxiety* mere moments before– fell dark.

Absent the usual murmur of the twin turbofans, an unsettling
silence hung heavy in the air...........

Wordlessly the pilots exchanged meaningful glances both
realising instantly and to their horror that the extra
weight of this silence meant their fate was sealed....
...... In effect, the highly advanced flying machine had
roughly the maneuverability of a flying brick,........ with
barely enough instrumentation to monitor its slow dive
towards the Earth..........

Lacking a more orthodox option, Captain Pearson cranked the
control wheel to the right and gave the left rudder pedal a
firm stomp. The criss-crossed controls tilted the deck to
the right as one wing dipped toward the ground, providing
the passengers with a lovely view of the golf course on one
side, and nothing but blue sky on the other. The fuselage
also rotated its heading to the left, becoming diagonal
relative to its direction of travel. Such forward-slip
maneuvers are sometimes used on small planes and gliders,
but the curve-ballish air acrobatics were unheard of with a
jumbo jet.

(Has to rank as the most cumbersome and floral description
ever of what is a very simple maneuver. And if someone on
the SMH had referred to a 767 as a jumbo, GB and a few other
nipickers here would be screaming their tits off.)

The airplane indeed decelerated, but the reduced airspeed
robbed the controls of even more of its precious hydraulic
pressure, requiring Pearson to apply *monumental* force to try
to straighten the slip.

At the opposite end of the runway, the Family Day
campers and spectators had finally spotted the silent and
oddly-angled incoming aircraft, and they were scrambling
from its path with appropriate levels of panic. First
Officer Quintal caught sight of the fleeing families, but it
was far too late to revise their landing plans, so he opted
not to distract the captain with the unsettling discovery.

Panic? Fleeing? Surely not. In GBs make believe world nobody
ever panics or gets frightened. Only stupid passengers.

Forty feet above the ground– *mere* seconds before contact–
Captain Pearson managed to wrestle Flight 143 back to a
*straight* and *level* approach........

Riiiight.

At 8:38pm central time, the
rear landing gears *grabbed* the tarmac at Gimli airport, and
Bob Pearson stood on the brake pedals as the airplane
skidded towards the scattering bystanders. A few of the
loudly protesting tires finally succumbed to the abuse and
blew out with adequate force to shimmy the fuselage. As some
of the weight shifted forward, the unsecured front landing
gear buckled, dumping the nose section onto the pavement and
spraying a *three-hundred* foot shower of sparks.............

Riiiiiight. Sure it did.

After sledding across the *asphalt* for 2,900 feet,....

Asphalt? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA - can you say *concrete*?

Big snip.

....As for the Gimli Glider herself, the twenty-four year old
767 remains an active part of the Air Canada fleet to this
very day. Some grizzled old pilots swear that sometimes,
when the wind is just right on a quiet night, you can just
about make out the double-engine-failure BONG! as the old
girl is flying by; and if you're very lucky, you might catch
the faint odor of damp pilots in the air........

The mind boggles at the scripting of this load of
sensationalist garbage posted by, of all people, the
hypocritic phony who perennially whines, complains and
scourges MSM journos for use of extravagant language.