It is the question every nervous flyer has quietly asked somewhere over the ocean: what if the engines just stop? All of them. At once. Here is the answer, and it is genuinely one of the most reassuring facts in aviation: the plane keeps flying. It does not drop. It does not tumble. It becomes a very large, very heavy, surprisingly capable glider. And this is not theory. It has happened, and the stories are incredible.
You may have heard that an airliner can glide about ten times its altitude. The truth is even better. A typical airliner has a glide ratio of around 15:1, which means it travels roughly 2.5 nautical miles forward for every 1,000 feet of altitude it gives up. Run that math from a cruise altitude of 36,000 feet and you get about 100 miles of reach, with no engines at all. That is not a plummet. That is 20 minutes or so of controlled, flyable descent, and 100 miles of reach in every direction almost always contains a runway. The wings do not know the engines have stopped. They just keep doing their job.
On July 23, 1983, Air Canada Flight 143, a nearly new Boeing 767 flying from Montreal to Edmonton, ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet over Ontario. The cause was a unit mix-up during Canada's switch to metric: the fuel load was calculated in pounds instead of kilograms, so the jet left with about half the fuel it needed. Both engines flamed out. Here is the twist of fate: Captain Bob Pearson was an experienced sailplane pilot. He and First Officer Maurice Quintal glided the 767 to a former air force runway at Gimli, Manitoba, which had been converted into a motorsports park and was hosting races that day. Pearson even used a sideslip, a glider trick almost never seen on an airliner, to lose height on final. The nose gear would not lock, so the jet finished its landing nose down in a shower of sparks. All 61 passengers and 8 crew survived, and the aircraft itself was repaired and flew on until 2008.
You probably know this one. On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, an Airbus A320, hit a flock of Canada geese just after takeoff from LaGuardia and lost nearly all thrust in both engines. Captain Chesley Sullenberger and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles had almost no altitude to trade and less than four minutes to act, so they glided the jet to a ditching on the Hudson River. All 155 people on board survived, and the NTSB later affirmed that ditching in the river gave everyone the best chance of survival. It remains the most famous proof that even at low altitude, a jet with no engines is still an aircraft, not a rock.
The record holder is Air Transat Flight 236. On August 24, 2001, an Airbus A330 flying from Toronto to Lisbon with 306 people aboard developed a fuel leak over the Atlantic, caused by an incorrect part that let a fuel line chafe against a hydraulic line. Both engines starved and quit, the second one about 65 nautical miles from Lajes Air Base in the Azores. Captain Robert Piché and First Officer Dirk DeJager glided the widebody for about 19 minutes, in the dark, over open ocean, and put it down on the runway. Everyone survived. It is widely cited as the longest engines-out glide by a passenger jet: about 65 nautical miles, roughly 75 of the statute kind, with nothing but altitude in the tank.
How do pilots steer a jet with no engine power? Meet the ram air turbine, or RAT: a small fold-out propeller that swings into the airstream and spins, generating emergency hydraulic and electrical power for the essentials, like flight controls and core instruments. It deploys automatically when the aircraft loses its main power sources. A RAT helped keep the Gimli 767 controllable, and one powered Air Transat 236 all the way down. And remember how rare this all is. A widely quoted FAA figure puts turbine engine failure at about one per 375,000 flight hours, and losing two at once essentially requires something external hitting both, such as:
Each of those is vanishingly rare on its own, and aviation has redesigned procedures and parts after every single one.
So here is the payoff. The next time you plan a trip with the FlightBeat calculator and picture those hours at 36,000 feet, remember what that altitude really is: stored safety. Seven miles of height is 100 miles of gliding reach, a fact proven over a Manitoba drag strip, a New York river, and the mid-Atlantic. The engines almost never quit. And on the astonishing occasions they have, the plane simply did what planes do best. It kept flying.
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