staff overestimated the amount of fuel contained in
the airplane’s tanks.
For the pilots, the first sign of trouble occurred
when the plane was flying over the northern part of
Ontario: A warning sounded in the cockpit indicat-
ing that fuel pressure was dropping. Then, suddenly,
the fuel ran out, and the engines stopped, leaving
the pilots in command of a large airplane without
any power at forty-one thousand feet. To make the
situation even more serious, the pilots calculated
that the nearest major airport, at Winnipeg, Mani-
toba, was too far away for the plane to reach. The 767
was declining in altitude at a rate of several thousand
feet per minute, meaning it would be able to glide
only a short distance before it crashed into the
ground. Luckily, one of the plane’s pilots had once
flown out of a small airport in Gimli, Manitoba, so he
was able to direct the plane to that airfield. Equally
helpful, the other pilot had experience flying glid-
ers, which was in effect what the powerless Boeing
767 had become. Despite the lack of power, which
caused some of the cockpit instruments not to func-
tion, the airplane managed to reach the airport. It
touched down roughly and ended up nose down on
a runway, narrowly avoiding automobiles and peo-
ple at one end of the runway that, unbeknownst to
the pilots, was being used as a racetrack. Miracu-
lously, no one was injured.
Impact The story of the Gimli Glider, as the plane
was called, briefly but forcefully captured the imagi-
nation of a public fearful of plane crashes. It both
frightened and inspired people, and the heroism of
the cockpit crew partly made up for the shocking er-
ror that had been made in calculating the plane’s
fuel load. The Gimli Glider survived its harrowing
experience intact and continued in service as part of
Air Canada’s fleet for years.
Further Reading
Hoffer, William, and Marilyn Hoffer.Freefall: From
41,000 Feet to Zero—A True Stor y. New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1989.
Montesi, Jorge, dir.Falling from the Sky: Flight 174.
Canada, Television Movie, 1995.
Steve Hewitt
See also Air India Flight 182 bombing; Pan Am
Flight 103 bombing; Sioux City plane crash; Tru-
deau, Pierre.
Glass, Philip
Identification American composer and musician
Born January 31, 1937; Baltimore, Maryland
Regarded as a prominent minimalist composer, Philip
Glass often collaborated with visual artists, actors, and
musicians, influencing his compositional technique.
Already established as a composer of theater music
when the 1980’s began, Philip Glass completed his
second opera,Satyagraha, in the first year of the de-
cade. The opera, based on the early life of Mahatma
Gandhi in South Africa, formed part of the operatic
“portrait” trilogy that began with the monumental
Einstein on the Beach(1976). That first work includes
poetry and text relating to and commenting on gen-
eral relativity, nuclear weapons, science, and AM ra-
dio. It consists of nine connected twenty-minute
scenes taking place over a five-hour period with no
intermission. Audiences are instructed to come and
go as they please. The third opera,Akhnaten(1983),
portrays an Egyptian pharaoh and includes libretto
spoken in ancient Egyptian.
The completion of the operatic trilogy was a musi-
cal departure for Glass, sinceEinstein on the Beach
was his only opera composed before 1980. Perme-
ating his music were the stylistic characteristics of
minimalism, including continual repetition of re-
peated sounds and rhythmic patterns that gradually
evolved over the course of the work. Also termed
“systematic music,” short musical themes in Glass’s
work undergo alterations through change in length,
choice of notes, or rhythmic variation. Some critics
refer to this type of music as simplistic and lacking va-
riety. However, Glass was considered an advanced,
eclectic composer who used minimalist techniques,
rather than being labeled a strict minimalist.
Glass first collaborated with Robert Wilson, an
American avant-garde stage director and playwright,
on theEinsteinproject. They teamed again to create
the CIVIL warSfor the 1984 Olympic Games in Los
Angeles. The full production was canceled as a result
of insufficient funding, but portions received full
productions in Rome; Minneapolis; Rotterdam, the
Netherlands; and Cologne, Germany. The opera’s
other two sections were workshopped in Tokyo and
Marseilles, France.The CIVIL warSstaged events
from ancient Athens to futuristic spaceships and was
another landmark composition. Glass’s final oper-
atic scores of the 1980’s includedThe Making of theThe Eighties in America Glass, Philip 417