The Gimli Glider is one of those stories where every aspect sounds more fake than the last and yet it all actually happened.
-A passenger plane was underloaded with fuel because Canada had just converted to the metric system and everyone supposed to double check their numbers got it wrong. -When the plane ran out of fuel they were too far away to make it to an in-service airport and had to head towards the Gimli military base. Which was shuttered. -They were coming in to fast due to a lack of flaps control and had to perform a series of slips (as shown in the video above) to slow down, basically drifting a giant passenger plane. -As they come down they realized that just because Gimli’s been decommissioned doesn’t mean it’s abandoned because a bunch of people are having drag races on the runway they’re about to need. -Despite everything they managed to land safely and no one was killed or even hurt which is why it’s one of the best air disasters to meme on.
The Wikipedia page on this is fantastic and my favorite line from it is “Flying with all engines out was never expected to occur, so it had never been covered in training.”
In the early 70s Sesame Street was created with an eye towards educating poor, inner-city children for free, and became a massive hit with all children. In 2016, faced with going off the air forever after facing conservative efforts to destroy public broadcasting since basically its beginning, new episodes became a timed exclusive for premium cable network HBO. In 2022 HBO Max, newly merged with and taken over by reality TV channel Discovery, removed Sesame Street episodes and spin-offs from streaming as a tax write-off and scheme to avoid paying residuals.
Sesame Street’s official YouTube channel is uploading the episodes for free, btw. A lot of creators are rebelling against this bullshit.
As always, America, PBS has you and your kids’ backs.
I also want to put in a plug for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, spearheaded by GBH in Boston to preserve and make available public funded programming from around the country. More than 7000 public television and radio programs are available to stream through the website, with more than 40000 hours of programming archived and available to researchers and educators through the Library of Congress and GBH itself.
One of my fav things about this is that they clearly tried this several times cause you can see her cleaning her face off from the last attempt in the background. What a team player.
