This was a very Canadian accident, in that they ran out of fuel halfway through their cross-country flight because of (in the end) conversion errors in calculating the required fuel amount for the then-new metric 767. Canada was still in the conversion process from imperial to metric, and the airline industry was a relative latecomer to that change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
But absolute respect to the pilot for getting it down in one piece. I mean on one level he was just doing his job. but sometimes that is all it takes to be a hero, to do your job in the face of adversary.
Thousands of planes in the air every day, that one with engine failure has a pilot who practices without engines isn't surprising. I'd be more surprised if he was a skilled mechanic who repaired the engine in situ.
But it's also amazing just how few fatal air crashes there are! I know that the FAA is pretty incredible at their job, but there just aren't that many incidents of planes going down and killing everyone on board - and out of those few bad incidents, having two where everything lined up perfectly feelsl weird!
There were some "lap children" on the flight, some of whom died in the crash. So it was proposed that all children be in their own seats on commercial flights. This regulation was in place for less than a decade before being revoked. The reason? Economists estimated that because this would raise the cost of a family flying, it would encourage some to drive instead of flying -- and for every 1 life saved by the regulation, it would cost 60 lives due to the much more dangerous driving.
