Twenty-five years after he pulled off a miracle in the air, retired pilot Bob Pearson was applauded, cheered and embraced by people in this small lakefront community north of Winnipeg.
The hero's welcome, which included a parade, left Pearson overcome with emotion.
"Overwhelming, I mean, awestruck,'' Pearson told reporters as he struggled to describe his feelings.
"I'm sort of speechless.''
On July 23, 1983, Pearson was piloting an Air Canada 767 from Ottawa to Edmonton when disaster struck. Some 41,000 feet over northern Ontario, the jet ran out of fuel.
Soon afterward, both engines shut down and the crew realized they would not be able to make it to Winnipeg for an emergency landing. Pearson's co-pilot, Maurice Quintal, remembered there was an abandoned airstrip nearby in Gimli.
Pearson managed to glide the powerless aircraft to Gimli, and by giving the big jet a last-minute sideways shimmy he remembered from his days as a glider pilot, was able to cut altitude and land the plane without injuring any of the 69 people on board.
A smiling Pearson and five crew members were brought back to Gimli on Wednesday to mark the anniversary of the event. They were the stars of a parade watched by a large portion of the town's 5,000 residents.
"This is really becoming a second home to us,'' beamed Pearson, who lives on a farm in eastern Ontario.
The crew was also honoured with the unveiling of a new mural on the sea wall that protects Gimli's harbour from the rough waters of Lake Winnipeg. The painting depicts the aircraft moments after it landed, its nose collapsed on the ground.
The painting also shows three boys who were riding bicycles on the airstrip that day and narrowly escaped being crushed. Pearson brought the plane to a halt just 100 metres from where the boys stood transfixed like deer in the headlights of an oncoming car.
For the boys, who are now grown men, it was their first chance to say thank you to the man whose calm and collected actions averted disaster.
"It was an emotional moment. I think what he did was amazing,'' said Art Zuke, who was 14 at the time.
"I mean, both of us had near-death experiences right across a pane of glass from each other.''
The emergency landing prompted a federal inquiry. The lack of fuel was blamed on several factors, including an erroneous conversion from imperial measurements to metric. The 767 was the first Air Canada aircraft to use the metric system.
The landing is arguably the biggest event in Gimli's history. Nearly everyone in town can recall where they were when the big plane made its hard landing, said Mayor Tammy Axelsson.
