Soaring

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

In a heavily industrialized world, it's nearly impossible not to take some things for granted.

Even the most modern systems require an immense amount of effort behind the scenes.

For instance, when you enter an elevator, it's not just automated steel cable and pulleys hoisting you up, it's also every single person who inspected the elevator and declared that it was safe to ride in.

In the same way, when you board an airplane, you're in the hands of hundreds of people, from the pilots to the engineers and the air traffic controllers, all of whom are dedicated to keeping you safe.

But of course, often it's only possible to appreciate this when things go wrong.

On June 22nd of 1983, Air Canada Flight 143 was preparing to take off from Montreal when the flight crew ran into a snag.

The plane was a Boeing 767, a relatively new introduction to Canadian airspace, and the systems had proven finicky from the get-go.

The biggest problem was that the fuel gauge was broken, so they could not see the amount of fuel in the tank.

The ground crew told the pilot, Captain Bob Pearson, that it would take at least a day for replacement parts to arrive, but Pearson did not want to wait.

There were 61 passengers relying on him.

Ultimately, the pilots decided to measure the fuel manually, doing the math to convert the weight of the fuel into liters, 1.77 pounds per liter, and then they took off the following day for an estimated flight time of four and a half hours.

At 41,000 feet, a warning light started to go off in the cockpit, indicating low fuel pressure.

The warnings seemed to indicate that the fuel tanks were much lighter than they should be.

Then the engines started to shut down.

When the first one stalled out, the pilots called air traffic control, requesting to divert to Winnipeg.

When the second engine failed, they realized that they weren't even going to make it that far.

Their plane was no longer flying.

It was just gliding.

Captain Pearson had experience with gliders, but there's a steep difference between your average glider and a Boeing 767.

The closest airstrip, 12 miles from them, was a former Royal Canadian Air Force base in Gimli, Manitoba.

The only problem was that it had been decommissioned and one of the runways had since been converted into a motor park.

Neither the pilots nor the air traffic controllers were aware of this though.

They only knew that there was a runway barely close enough for them to reach.

As the plane sailed toward the airstrip, systems continued to fail.

Pearson's control of the airplane was limited to manual.

The weight of the aircraft was fighting against the pilots' efforts to keep it level, banking hard against air currents.

Meanwhile, on the ground, the Winnipeg Sports Car Club was holding an amateur sports car race on the track that had once been Gimli's second airstrip.

From the ground, the motorists saw a plane plummeting toward their position at an awkward angle.

Terrified, they promptly fled across the field.

The next problem?

Well, the plane was going too fast for a safe landing.

Pearson would have to decelerate and fast.

Otherwise, they would skid past the runway and crash.

When they touched down, Pearson immediately slammed on the brakes, causing some of the landing gear tires to violently blow out from the friction.

The plane careened forward, skidding across the landing strip for almost 3,000 feet before finally coming to a halt, its nose down and tail in the air.

The passengers survived with minor injuries.

In the aftermath of what would become known as the Gimli glider incident, a review determined that the plane, on top of having a non-functional fuel gauge, didn't have any fuel in its tanks.

This was puzzling to the crew who had accounted for this.

They'd eventually learned that the problem was a mathematical one.

The gauges in the new Boeing 767 measured its fuel weight based on the metric system, the first plane in Canadian airspace to do so.

So the formula that Pearson's crew used to calculate the weight was incorrect.

They should have accounted for 0.8 kilograms per liter rather than 1.77 pounds.

Both Pearson and his co-pilot were reprimanded for their error, but in a sense, the passengers were fortunate to have them.

Pearson's experienced flying gliders ensured their safe landing, and the co-pilot has suggested Gimli Runway despite it not being an active airbase.

Looking back, it's clear that they had the perfect set of skills to account for their own errors.

We should all be so lucky.

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The thing about airport security is that they're trained to spot a lie.

They'll notice in an instant if your palms are sweating, if you avoid eye contact, if any part of your story doesn't add up.

Fooling them doesn't just require nerves of steel, it takes an Oscar-worthy performance.

It was a chilly January morning in Tehran, and the airport was buzzing with tense energy.

Lines of stiff-backed travelers inched through security, speaking to one another in clipped sentences while pretending not to notice the machine-gun-toting soldiers posted at every corner.

In this scene walked a group of filmmakers.

You could spot them a mile away, not because they were glamorous, but because they were not.

The filmmakers were the most aggressively casual people in the terminal, sporting bell-bottom jeans, shaggy California haircuts, and oversized sunglasses.

They carried bulging suitcases, a few tattered movie scripts, and the kind of self-importance that you typically only find in Hollywood.

The leader, a man with a questionable mustache and an armful of rolled-up movie posters, stepped forward first.

The name on his paperwork was Kevin Costa Harkins.

And as he explained to the Iranian immigration officer, he was a Canadian film producer.

He and his crew had spent the last few days scouting locations for an upcoming sci-fi epic that they hoped to shoot in Iran's otherworldly deserts.

The officer inspected Kevin's Canadian passport with the slow, deliberate suspicion of a man who had heard every excuse in the book and trusted none of them.

And to be fair, he had good reason to be skeptical.

Iran was embroiled in revolution, and tensions between the country and the West had never been higher.

A few months earlier, in November of 1979, a group of Iranian students had stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took more than 50 diplomats hostage.

Since then, the city had become one of the most dangerous places in the world for Americans.

Many Western countries shuttered their embassies, warning their expats in the country to get out as soon as they could.

But Kevin and his film crew had apparently not taken that advice.

As he explained to the immigration officer, movies couldn't wait for politics.

They had art to make.

And besides, they were Canadian, not American.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the official stamped Kevin's passport, slid it back across the counter, and waved him through.

One by one, the others followed.

They held their breaths until the last boarding pass was checked, the cabin doors closed, and the wheels finally lifted off Iranian soil.

Seated in coach with champagne trembling in paper cups, the group exchanged shaky smiles.

They couldn't believe what they had just pulled off.

Because they weren't filmmakers.

They weren't even Canadian.

They were six American diplomats running for their lives.

During the chaos of the embassy attack in November, a handful of Americans had managed to slip away.

For months, they'd hid inside the homes of Canadian diplomats, including the Canadian ambassador, Ken Taylor, who risked his life protecting them.

Working together, Canadian officials and the CIA brainstormed and discarded countless plans to bring the diplomats home.

It was Tony Mendez, a CIA officer posing as Kevin, who suggested smuggling them out on a commercial plane.

He concocted the lie about a sci-fi film shooting in the Iranian desert and had ads for it printed in Iranian newspapers to lend it legitimacy.

Meanwhile, the Canadian embassy provided fake passports and exit visas.

The plan's only weak point was that it required the diplomats to lie their way past Iranian immigration officials without slipping.

They weren't trained spies or actors, and if they faltered for even a second, it would mean prison or worse.

Instead, they gave the performance of a lifetime.

History remembers their daring escape as the Canadian Caper.

The Canadians just called it helping out a friend in need.

In Hollywood, well, they eventually made a movie about the event.

It's called Argo, after the fictional sci-fi film concocted by the CIA.

Oh, and just like the performance that inspired the movie, it too proved to be Oscar worthy.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting CuriositiesPodcast.com.

The show was created by me, Aaron Mankey, in partnership with How Stuff Works.

I make another award-winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show.

And you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com.

And until next time, stay curious.

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