A landing for the ages The story of the Gimli Glider can’t be told without the perspective of the boys on the bikes, who had an up-close view of aviation history 40 years ago By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 1:45 PM CDT Thursday, Jul. 20, 2023 Last Modified: 9:38 AM CDT Friday, Jul. 21, 2023 Updates

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/07/2023 (819 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

July 23, 1983. It’s a beautiful Saturday evening at the Gimli Motorsports Park. It’s a Winnipeg Sports Car Club family day, so the Gimli drag strip — a converted runway at a decommissioned Royal Canadian Air Force base — is humming with activity. Racing is finished for the day, but people are hanging out, barbecuing and taking advantage of the perfect summer weather.

Cam Berglind, 13, Kerry Seabrook, 11, and Art Zuke, 14 — buddies whose family cottages are in nearby Sandy Hook — decide to ride their bikes down the length of the drag strip. They want to watch the planes come in on the nearby active airstrip.

Meanwhile, 41,000 feet over Red Lake, Ont., Air Canada Flight 143 is in trouble.

The Boeing 767, en route to Edmonton from Montreal with 61 passengers and eight crew on board, has run out of fuel. A grim calculation reveals Capt. Bob Pearson and First Officer Maurice Quintal will not make their planned emergency landing in Winnipeg without engines. Their only shot is to try to glide the plane to the decommissioned runway in Gimli, where Quintal had been stationed with the RCAF.

They don’t know it’s now a drag strip.

On the ground, the boys notice the beleaguered plane.

“We still thought, when we saw the plane coming in, that it was coming on to the active runway,” says Seabrook, now 50. “Again, our point of reference was, this is a drag strip. And I’m like, ‘OK, this would be a neat one to see.’

“And then, it lines up for us.”

The plane hits the ground and begins to race along the tarmac. In the cockpit, Pearson can see three boys on bicycles. On the runway. Right in front of him.

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It’s been 40 years since Pearson made that astonishing landing in Gimli, with no casualties or serious injuries on board or on the ground, after a metric conversion error left him with no fuel and Flight 143 became the Gimli Glider.

The boys on the bikes, meanwhile, are firmly ensconced in Gimli Glider lore. “I think anytime you have children in danger, it catches your attention,” says Barbara Gluck, president of the Gimli Glider Museum where, yes, there is a bike on display.

The boys on the bikes have served as the basis for some white-knuckle moments in dramatic television re-enactments. They have been immortalized in a mural on the Gimli Seawall.

They even made it into Manitoba’s Grade 9 math curriculum.

“It was a math problem about descent,” says Zuke, now 54, a teacher who taught at West Kildonan Collegiate for 18 years. “I always knew when they were getting to that part of the math book because my band students would come in and they’d be looking at me quizzically. And they’d say, ‘We’re doing this math problem and your name was…’ ‘Yeah, that was me.’”

Zuke and Seabrook are sitting on the porch at Seabrook’s Sandy Hook cottage — the same cottage he returned to (late, by the way, much to his parents’ chagrin) after witnessing history as an 11-year-old boy — on a morning in early July, talking about their brush with the Gimli Glider. The pair are still in touch on a daily basis, lifelong friends with the easy shorthand of brothers. They still spend their summers in Sandy Hook and have deep ties to the community.

“It was probably about the 10-year mark when it was really highlighted on an annual basis. And every year, around July 23, the stories come up, and our names come up. And then people put two and two together and say, ‘Was that you?’ ‘Yeah, that was me.’ And we tell the story again.”

They don’t mind that they’re still known as the boys on the bikes — or the runway boys — into middle age, though their pop-a-wheelie days are behind them. They even got themselves T-shirts printed up; both say Runway Boy #1.

“I was 11 when that happened — you just didn’t appreciate it,” Seabrook says. “And people would ask afterwards, like later in life, was that you? ‘Oh, yeah, that was.’ I forgot about it for the longest time. Like, it just wasn’t a thing.

“Eventually, it just sort of built this cult following.”

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When the boys first spot Flight 143, they notice something weird: the plane’s completely silent.

“That’s what caught my attention,” Seabrook says. “Like, A. this is really big, we don’t get big planes like this here. And B., why isn’t it making any sound?”

It’s also coming in at a strange angle. Pearson — who, luckily, is an experienced glider pilot — performs a manoeuvre called a sideslip. He angles the plane sideways to the left so it can slice through the oncoming air, losing altitude without gaining forward speed. But the plane is also at a 60-degree bank. Out of the left windows, passengers can see directly down to the sand traps at a golf course below.

Zuke vividly remembers seeing the plane’s odd approach from the ground. “The way that giant airliner contorted in the sky — you just don’t see planes doing that,” he says.

Flight 143 drops quickly out of the sideslip, lines up with the runway, and hits the ground, blowing out two tires. The nose gear gives out.

“It wasn’t really a touchdown — it was a slam down,” Zuke recalls. “Like, it fell right out of the sky onto the runway. You could feel the Earth — it didn’t shake, it just kind of compressed and then came back.”

The plane barrels down the runway, its nose scraping up the tarmac, before it slams into a guardrail that has been installed down the centre of the runway. It grinds to a stop — “150, 200 feet short of us,” Zuke says. About the length of an NHL hockey rink.

The boys have a clear view into the cockpit.

“You could see their shoulder bars and their white shirts,” Seabrook says.

“I mean, (Pearson) was literally looking down at us. And we were literally looking up at him,” Zuke says.

Once the boys clock the smoke coming from the nose, they take off on their bikes.

“We knew enough to run into the pit area with the adults and we were screaming ‘fire! plane crash!’ on our bikes,” Seabrook says. “And people are going, ‘what?’ They had no idea.”

“Someone’s flipping a burger and they turn around and it’s like ‘whoa, that wasn’t there five minutes ago,’” Zuke adds.

“Other than that big thud that we heard when it fell out of the sky onto the runway, we didn’t really hear anything,” Zuke says. “Not even as it was scraping up to a stop. The sound was just absorbed by all of the other ambient sounds in the area. I mean, there were people talking, there were people barbecuing, there was music playing.”

As the adults peel out with fire extinguishers to go help, the boys have to wait around. It’s not long before reporters start showing up on the scene, and word gets around that there were kids on the runway when the plane came down.

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The boys on the bikes certainly capture people’s imaginations, but sometimes people let their imaginations run away with them.

Here, Seabrook and Zuke would like to set the record straight. At no point did the boys try to out-pedal an airplane.

“There’s been a lot of creative licence over the years with re-enactments,” Zuke says.

A tense scene in the 2008 Gimli Glider episode of the Canadian documentary series Mayday depicts two boys trying to outride the plane — a baseball cap flying off of one of their heads for added dramatic effect.

“We looked way cooler than those kids in the Mayday reenactment,” Zuke says, deadpan.

Falling from the Sky: Flight 174, a 1995 TV movie based on the events of the Gimli Glider, also has a bicycle scene. This time, it was one boy trying to outride the plane while his father, improbably running on foot, yells for him to get out of the way, the airplane’s wheels passing directly over their heads.

“It makes for good storytelling, and it makes for good TV, to imagine or see these kids trying to outrun a plane coming at them,” Zuke says. “But in reality, I mean, we were teenage boys — I was 14, he was 11. Fourteen and 11 year olds don’t process information that well, anyway. We weren’t even aware enough of what was going on to even be afraid. So the idea of us pointing at a plane and going ‘ahhhhh’ and running, it didn’t happen. We just sat there and with this kind of ‘duh’ look on our faces and watched it come in.”

In fact, they thought about getting closer to it once it had come to a stop — until they noticed the smoke.

“We didn’t know there was no fuel on board, but we saw smoke and flame out of the nose, like this could blow up — that sucks, let’s get out of here,” Zuke says. “And so that’s when we hightailed it out of there. But it was after people had already been evacuating and the plane had come to a stop.”

“The one part I vividly recall is Art riding his bike away screaming ‘we gotta go’ and I’m still like, ‘yeah, but this is cool,’” Seabrook says. “And he’s like, ‘jet fuel, explosion,’ and it’s like, ‘oh, riiiiight.’

“It was just not at the forefront, the danger level.”

But it’s not just re-enactments that have changed the story over the years. Even the reporters on the scene had a preconceived idea about what had happened out on the runway.

Those exchanges, Zuke says, went something like this:

REPORTER: “So, were you horrified? Did you run from the plane?”

ART ZUKE, 14: “Uhhhh, no. We thought it was cool.”

REPORTER, WRITING IN NOTEBOOK: They were horrified and they ran away.

“We would see newspaper articles, national articles, about how we were fleeing for our lives and horrified,” Zuke says. “Wow, that is a great read.”

“Notwithstanding, if you were to run away, wouldn’t you run… to the side?” Seabrook asks, making Zuke erupt into laughter.

They’ve had their own fun with the story over the years, especially on social media. If someone posts about the Runway Boys or the Boys on the Bikes, they’re all over it.

“If I’m the first to comment on the post, I talk about what kind of a hero I was, and how I consoled Kerry and Kerry was crying and cowering in the background, and I stopped the plane with my bare hand to keep it from running over Kerry,” Zuke says. “But if he’s first, he’ll tell a similar story.”

“My guess is you two had to race home to make a change of undies after that?” someone asked on a recent post.

“There was no race… Art Zuke was the clear winner of leaving his own skid marks on the runway,” Seabrook replied.

“There was no saving Kerry Seabrook’s Underoos that day: straight to the bonfire with those!” Zuke added.

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Another thing that happened in retellings over time: three boys on bikes became two boys on bikes. Berglind was written out of the story. (And although this reporter was unable to track Berglind down for an interview, he won’t be written out of this one.)

Seabrook and Zuke lost touch with Berglind sometime in the 1990s, but they have made sure to mention his name in interviews and social media posts, and that he was included in the Gimli Glider mural on the Gimli Seawall.

Gluck, of the Gimli Glider Museum, had proposed a Gimli Glider mural on the seawall, which features artistic renderings of various events in Interlake history, in tribute to the skill of the pilots.

“And the artist (Dave McNabb) said to me, ‘Well, what do you see?’” Gluck recalls. “We always hear ‘boys on the bikes, the boys on the bikes,’ that phrase, so I think we need to have them off in the corner. And we need to rectify history by putting three boys there, not just two.”

The mural, which depicts the nose-down Air Canada plane and three boys on bicycles, was unveiled at the 25th anniversary celebrations in 2008. That’s also where Seabrook and Zuke finally met Pearson for the first time.

“Well, the first time intentionally,” Zuke jokes.

They were finally able to shake Pearson’s hand, and learn what was happening on the other side of the cockpit window that day.

“I think that was the year that I first learned that they had contemplated taking the plane off the runway to avoid us,” Seabrook says. “I had never heard that until then.”

“I’ve seen Bob interviewed about it and, you know, he’s very, very professional,” Zuke says. “He knows his technical stuff, and it was very much a technical problem for him to solve. It didn’t become an emotional event for him until he saw us. All of a sudden, it wasn’t just, ‘how do I deal with all the mechanics, here.’ It became ‘we cannot run over these kids.’”

This story could have had a much different ending, Seabrook and Zuke are well aware. If the weather had been bad. If the plane had overshot the runway. If there’d been a fire. If the boys had pedalled out on the bikes earlier, as they’d previously planned.

They don’t dwell too much on the what ifs.

“But when I get on a plane, I do appreciate the number of moving parts and people that it takes to back away from the gate,” Seabrook says. “It’s like, I hope everyone had a good day.”

“The hyper-awareness, it doesn’t give me anxiety or anything like that but you sure think about all the details a lot more,” Zuke adds. “I’m interested in hearing news stories about flights and watching Mayday and things like that, and how people overcome those things. It certainly raised my interest.”

Having two of the three boys on the bikes on hand for the 25th anniversary was actually a surprise for Pearson. In the days leading up to the celebration, Pearson was asking Gluck about them. He wanted to meet them.

“He said to me, ‘do you know where the boys on the bikes are? Like, what happened to them? Are they around?’” she says. “And I didn’t lie to him. I just said, ‘Well, I’ll see what I can do about it.’”

There was already a plan in place to have Seabrook and Zuke ride up to Pearson as fast as they could on bikes. “Which everybody thought was quite funny,” Zuke says.

“We did stop short of him, so we returned the favour. You’re welcome, Bob.”

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Aug. 8, 2008. It’s a little over two weeks after the 25th anniversary celebrations, and Seabrook is driving north on Highway 8 when he notices a Cessna. At first, he thinks it’s a cropduster. “And then same thing, it turns,” Seabrook says.

The plane is heading right for him.

Seabrook has to pull his truck into the ditch so the Cessna, which had taken off from St. Andrews Airport, can make an emergency landing right on the highway. No one is injured.

Zuke gets a call from a reporter asking if he was one of the boys on the bikes who was at the Gimli Glider.

“Yeah, that was me,” Zuke says. “But the anniversary’s past so you’re a little late on this.’”

Then the reporter asks if he was the person who just about got hit by a plane on Highway 8.

“No,” Zuke answers. “But I’ll bet I know who it was.’”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com