On August 24, 2001, Air Transat Flight 236 from Toronto to Lisbon suffered a major fuel leak over the Atlantic Ocean. The Airbus A330-243, registered C-GITS, was carrying 293 passengers and 13 crew members. The right engine shut down first, followed by the left engine after the aircraft ran out of fuel at an altitude of 34,500 feet, approximately 120 kilometres from Lajes Air Base.
Captain Robert Piché and First Officer Dirk De Jager glided the A330 for approximately 19 minutes with both engines inoperative. After covering around 120 kilometres without engine power, the aircraft made a high-speed, hard landing on Runway 33 at Lajes Air Base in the Azores. The flight went down in aviation history as the longest unpowered glide by a commercial passenger aircraft. All 306 people on board survived, although 16 passengers and two cabin crew members were injured during the evacuation.
The investigation determined that a fuel line in the right engine had fractured after rubbing against an adjacent hydraulic line. The contact resulted from the incomplete implementation of a relevant service bulletin during an engine replacement and the use of incompatible fuel and hydraulic lines. The report also found that the crew initially failed to correctly identify the fuel leak and that their use of the crossfeed system to address the fuel imbalance accelerated the loss of fuel.
Following the successful dead-stick landing, Piché and De Jager received the Air Line Pilots Association’s Superior Airmanship Award in 2002.
