This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

In a heavily industrialized world, it's nearly impossible not to take some things for granted.

Even the most modern systems require an immense amount of efforts behind the scenes.

For instance, when you enter an elevator, it's not just automated steel cable and pulleys hoisting you up, it's also every single person who inspected the elevator

and declared that it was safe to ride in. In the same way, when you board an airplane, you're in

the hands of hundreds of people, from the pilots to the engineers and the air traffic controllers,

all of whom are dedicated to keeping you safe. But of course, often it's only possible to appreciate

this when things go wrong. On June 22nd of 1983, Air Canada Flight 143 was preparing to take

off from Montreal when the flight crew ran into a snag.

The plane was a Boeing 767, a relatively new introduction to Canadian airspace, and the

systems had proven finicky from the get-go. The biggest problem was that the fuel gauge was broken,

so they could not see the amount of fuel in the tank. The ground crew told the pilot,

Captain Bob Pearson, that it would take at least a day for replacement parts to arrive,

but Pearson did not want to wait. There were 61 passengers relying on him. Ultimately, the pilots

decided to measure the fuel manually, doing the math to convert the weight of the fuel into

liters, 1.77 pounds per liter, and then they took off the following day for an estimated

flight time of four and a half hours. At 41,000 feet, a warning light started to go off in

the cockpit indicating low fuel pressure. The warnings seemed to indicate that the fuel tanks were much

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