![]() ![]() And every year, around July 23, the stories come up, and our names come up. “It was probably about the 10-year mark when it was really highlighted on an annual basis. (Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press) Kerry Seabrook (left) and Art Zuke were 11 and 14 years old when they came nose-to-nose with the ill-fated aircraft. They still spend their summers in Sandy Hook and have deep ties to the community. The pair are still in touch on a daily basis, lifelong friends with the easy shorthand of brothers. 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. And they’d say, ‘We’re doing this math problem and your name was…’ ‘Yeah, that was me.’” “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. “It was a math problem about descent,” says Zuke, now 54, a teacher who taught at West Kildonan Collegiate for 18 years. They even made it into Manitoba’s Grade 9 math curriculum. They have been immortalized in a mural on the Gimli Seawall. The boys on the bikes have served as the basis for some white-knuckle moments in dramatic television re-enactments. “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, meanwhile, are firmly ensconced in Gimli Glider lore. Kerry Seabrook when he was 11 years old - the same year he was riding his bike on a defunct runway 40 years ago when the Gimli Glider landed after running out of gas. 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. ![]() In the cockpit, Pearson can see three boys on bicycles. The plane hits the ground and begins to race along the tarmac. And I’m like, ‘OK, this would be a neat one to see.’ “Again, our point of reference was, this is a drag strip. “We still thought, when we saw the plane coming in, that it was coming on to the active runway,” says Seabrook, now 50. On the ground, the boys notice the beleaguered plane. Their only shot is to try to glide the plane to the decommissioned runway in Gimli, where Quintal had been stationed with the RCAF. Bob Pearson and First Officer Maurice Quintal will not make their planned emergency landing in Winnipeg without engines. The Boeing 767, en route to Edmonton from Montreal with 61 passengers and eight crew on board, has run out of fuel. ![]() Meanwhile, 41,000 feet over Red Lake, Ont., Air Canada Flight 143 is in trouble. They want to watch the planes come in on the nearby active airstrip. Racing is finished for the day, but people are hanging out, barbecuing and taking advantage of the perfect summer weather.Ĭam 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. 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. It’s a beautiful Saturday evening at the Gimli Motorsports Park.
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