Central Display Winnipeg: Fill & Download for Free

Where to begin?Attractions in Manitoba are not like going to Disneyland on July 4th (that is just a form of insanity). Typically there are no long lines or inflated prices.Manitobans like most Canadians take advantage of the climate both Winter and Summer (the country really only has 2 seasons).Fishing, this is a year round activity and there a myriad number of lakes, rivers, and streams that an avid fisherman or a lay back angler can enjoy.Winter festivals such as Festival du Voyageur or the Trappers Festival in the Pas.Summer Festivals such as the Fringe Festival or FolklaramaCultural entertainment - The Royal Winnipeg Ballet - a world class company that performs at the same level as the major companies one reads about. The Winnipeg Symphony, the Manitoba Theater Center, the Winnipeg Art Gallery.History - Manitoba was the heart of the Fur Trade which was the driving force for the exploration and development of the North American (yes both the United States and Canada) west. Lower Fort Garry is an intact stone fort with displays and reenactments of life in the 18th and 19th century for trade world. The Manitoba Archives - this institution houses and often displays documents from its collection of Hudson Bay records which date back to 1670. It also has significant material related to the Riel Rebellion.Leisure - if you are not into formal activities there are wonderful parks that are worth spending time at. The Forks with its river ambiance amidst the hustle and bustle of central Winnipeg or Assineboine park with its large open fields, duck pond, zoo, sculpture garden an conservatory.Dinning out - whether it is fast food or gourmet dining Winnipeg has it all. There are likely more restaurants per capita in Winnipeg than in any other city in North America. I have heard restaurateurs say tha if you can make it in Winnipeg you can be successful anywhere.Pick your lifestyle and pick your season you will always find something special you can do, see, or experience I Manitoba and specifically Winnipeg.

As others have written, foreigners have trouble believing how large the country is and how cold it can be. Or rather, they have heard it is large and cold but they don’t have any frame of reference for real understanding. For example, my German-built VW beeps at me and displays a cold-weather warning when the outside temperature hits +4C. Everyone who has been in my car when that happens has a laugh about it. And this is coming from Germany where they do see ice and snow: imagine the perspective of someone from the tropics? No reference at all.Even people from within Canada sometimes don’t get it. I live in Saskatoon, which is the 2nd coldest city in Canada after Winnipeg. I had some friends from BC come for a visit in late February a few years ago. They had on the warmest jackets they owned, leather coats totally inadequate for the -35C they faced on landing that night. They still talk about it.We’ve had visitors from Japan ask if they could go to Montreal for the day. That would be 7 hours by air including a layover. Even if we had a direct flight it would be over 4 hours.Another thing they don’t believe is how casually we deal with these things. People in Saskatoon think nothing of going to Edmonton or Calgary for the weekend, 500 and 620 km away respectively. It was common to do a 3 day ski weekend to Banff when I was young, that’s 750 km. A good portion of people head to cabins 200 km north of here or more every weekend in the summer. We often talk of distances in time rather than km or miles. So Banff is 8 hours away, Edmonton is 5.In the winter, we do bitch about the cold. But it doesn’t stop us. There are no school closures no matter how cold unless a water main breaks. I go running in the cold, although -30 is my limit. Many people bike to work year-round. We walk our dogs, go shopping, normal things. Don’t get me wrong, life is much more indoors in winter. But it doesn’t halt with people huddled under blankets.Speaking of which, a Canadian house is more comfortable in winter than many houses in warm climates in their winters. We have excellent insulation and central heating. I have had visitors from Australia or England be surprised at how comfortable they were: back home they would be wearing big sweaters indoors with their uninsulated houses and crappy space heaters.I have a close friend who is a Toyota mechanic. They would report problems back to Toyota engineering like “in -35C, such and such a part breaks/stops functioning properly”. The engineers had trouble believing anyone would want or need to drive in such weather. Well, we’ve got to get to work or school or hockey practice or whatever, and -35 routinely happens here. Eventually the engineers started believing them and now Toyotas are more reliable in cold weather.We commonly just say the temperature without saying “minus”. In winter, plus temps are pretty rare so we will say “holy crap, it’s +2 today” if we get a thawing day rather than the more usual “it’s 25, better plug in the car”. Meaning it’s -25 and we need to plug in the block heater that keeps the oil liquid so that the car will start. We have had visitors think we are remarkably advanced with electric car tech when they see the rows of plugged-in cars on a cold day. Nope, just making sure they will start. It’s actually the opposite, batteries don’t do real well in cold and so you don’t see many pure electric or even hybrids in Saskatoon: people don’t trust they will hold up, we’ve seen too many batteries die in cold.Finally, having heard of this cold they have trouble believing how nice it is in summer. +30 days are common here, and the record is +41. That’s called the “continental” climate. Summers are hot and dry, winters are bitterly cold, distances are huge, people are friendly and helpful. We have to be, in a land this sparsely populated we could die in the cold if we didn’t lend a hand. This was especially true in the older days when the land was first settled. But even now, people can and do die of exposure. That’s why when we see someone stopped on the side of the road in winter, we make sure they are ok.

TL; DR — Air Canada chose to lay the majority of the blame on Pearson as he was the captain of the flight. This was successfully appealed. However for a good read, keep reading.I'm not a pilot, but as my dad was a pilot for AC at the time and a union representative, I got the union side of things on this accident. I have also read the TSB report.Some location shorthand:YEG — Edmonton International Airport.YUL — Montreal Dorval International Airport at the time, now Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport. Trivia: Pierre was Justin Trudeau's father.YOW — Ottawa International Airport.YWG — Winnipeg International Airport.Facts and events before the accident:The aircraft had a manufacturing defect in the fuel quantity indicator system processor. The fault was one the computer was not programmed to handle so the computer blanked the fuel gauge displays.There were no spare processors available.The day before in YEG a maintenance technician discovered that if he disconnected the channel of the processor with the fault (the processor has two channels) the gauges worked. He pulled the relevant breaker, put a tag on it to warn people to leave it pulled and wrote it up in the log book that the aircraft was cleared to fly so long as the fuel gauge readings were confirmed with a manual drip check. (Like checking the oil level in your car.) The aircraft flew to YUL the next day with no problems.After arrival in YUL, a maintenance technician decided to run his own tests on the fuel quantity indicator system. He reset the breaker which caused the gauges to go blank. After completing his tests he was distracted by the arrival of the pilots and the refueller, did not pull the breaker again nor remove the breaker tag. Neither the pilots nor the refueller noticed the breaker was not pulled and as the gauges weren't working as stated in the log book, the blank gauges were not a surprise.Based on the published Minimum Equipment List (MEL) the aircraft was not legal to operate with the gauges blank. When the pilots pointed this out, the maintenance technicians convinced the pilots that the aircraft was cleared to fly by Maintenance Central. (Later during the investigation it was found that this was total baloney.) The pilots acquiesced to the technician’s explanations however Captain Pearson elected to load all the fuel necessary to fly all the way to YEG; normally they would have only loaded enough fuel to fly to YOW. This decision likely prevented a greater tragedy had the aircraft ran out of fuel on approach to YOW and crashed in a populated area.The necessary fuel was calculated for the trip to YEG with a stop in YOW. As others mentioned the AC 767s were calibrated in metric. The fuel load was thus in kilograms. The refueller's truck measured fuel in litres and all of the other aircraft types in AC's fleet at the time measured fuel in pounds. It is not hard to see where this is going. Kerosene weighs 1.77 pounds per litre but only 0.8 kilograms pet litre. Normally the refueller connects the hose, enters the desired total fuel quantity in kilograms into the aircraft's refueling panel and the aircraft quenches its' own thirst. With the computer inoperative, the fueling had to be done manually including the conversion of litres into kilograms. The refueller and the pilots both used 1.77 instead of 0.8 and the aircraft only had 40% of the fuel load required and the same error was made on the manual drip check.The flight left YUL and during the stopover in YOW the tanks were drip checked again and the same math error occurred.Once airborne and enroute from YOW to YEG the stage was set for one of the best feats of airmanship. Here is brief list of events:About halfway to YEG, the pilots get their first indication of trouble — a low fuel pump pressure warning followed by a second.Pearson wasted no time and diverted the flight to YWG. A descent was started and at about 35,000 ft. one engine quit and shortly after that the second one quit as well. Everyone was now in a large glider with no thrust, no electrical power save for the batteries and no hydraulics. The pilots lost their electronic instruments and had to rely on standby instruments. As Captain Pearson put it, he had less instrumentation than a Piper Cub.Fortunately Boeing built in a failsafe — the ram air turbine. This little gizmo popped into the slipstream and its' propeller driven pump provided limited hydraulic pressure for the flight control surfaces. It would not however power the landing gear or flaps.Between the pilots and ATC they worked on gliding to YWG. As this was the days before ‘green dot’ best glide speed indication (all Airbus pilots know about this,) Pearson had to figure out his best guess for a speed that would produce the best range. As a private glider pilot he had experience to draw on.Eventually they figured out they weren't going to make it. ATC offered Gimli, an retired air force base. F/O Quintal, having been based there when he was in the military, knew the field. They headed for Gimli. What they didn't know was that the runways had been converted into a dragstrip.With no hydraulics to lower the landing gear, the gear was lowered by gravity. The mains clunked into place and locked, but because the nose gear swings forward when it drops, the slipstream did not allow it to lock. This would help later.Approaching Gimli, Pearson realized they were too high. Not wanting to risk running out of altitude or stalling while executing a 360º turn, Pearson drew on his glider experience again and executed a maneuver called a forward slip, where the plane is banked in one direction and the rudder applied in the opposite direction. The result is the aircraft maintains its' heading and speed, but descends much more quickly.Just before touchdown Pearson leveled out and flared, but because there were no flaps, at a much higher speed. He touched down 600 ft into the ideal touchdown zone (usually the first 1000 ft of a runway.) Some tires blew from the high speed and when the nose settled, the nose gear collapsed back into the wheel well and the plane slid on its' nose.The pilots noticed some kids on bikes on the runway (remember the runway is now a dragstrip,) and they see a guardrail that had been installed to create the strip racing lanes. He maneuvered using the brakes to rub up against the guardrail and the aircraft managed to stop without hitting anyone.No one was injured during the landing and the aircraft was evacuated using the slides. Because of the nose down attitude, the rear slides were steeper than normal and some passengers were injured sliding down these slides.When the tanks were checked they were dry.The aircraft was patched up enough to be fueled and flown to YWG for repairs and ultimately was returned to service. The Gimli Glider flew until 2008 when it was retired and sent to an aviation boneyard in the Mojave Desert for storage and eventual scrapping.So at what point could all of this been prevented? There were many, these are some:Had there been spare parts on hand.Had the YEG technician documented better.Had the YUL technician not been interrupted and/or returned and pulled the breaker.Had the correct conversion constant been used by 3 people (the pilots and the refuellers) both in YUL and YOW.Had AC ordered its’ 767s with imperial measure.Had AC provided better training on manual refueling procedures for the 767.Had the maintenance technicians not lied to the pilots over the legality of flying the aircraft as it was.Had the pilots refused to operate the flight.As there were so many who made errors along the way, the pilot's union thought it unfair to pin all the blame on Captain Pearson and F/O Quintal. The review board (not the TSB) agreed and their suspensions were overturned.I will also add what one comment mentioned: As I recall my father telling me, Air Canada put six different crews into a 767 simulator and recreated the scenario. None of the six managed to land the aircraft intact. I originally thought the TSB did this, but it was not mentioned in the report. If I'm wrong I'll have to get the memory chips in my head cleaned again.See the TSB's report: https://reports.aviation-safety.net/1983/19830723-0_B762_C-GAUN.pdfIf you don't have the time, here's the Wikipedia entry: Gimli Glider - WikipediaEdit: Wow! 20k views in less than 24 hours. I never thought that 35 years after the fact that the Gimli Glider would still draw such interest. My own is obvious from my father's connection to it and my love of aviation. Thanks for reading!Edit #2: Made some grammatical corrections and some factual changes after re-reading the TSB report to refresh my memory. Also made some readability changes. Thanks again for reading!Edit #3: After some more comments, I've decided to do a Paul Harvey and add the rest of the story. Enjoy and thanks again for reading!