OK, hold the fucking phone here. This video is just a disaster. It is flippant and glossing over the facts of what actually happened. This story is a favorite of mine, so I have done a lot a reading on it.

This happened in 1983 (36 years ago).

>> Do planes seriously not have a fuel gauge?

There is specifically a digital fuel gauge processor on that plane, and it was malfunctioning. There was an inductor coil that wasn't properly soldered onto the circuit board. At that time, planes were allowed to fly without a functioning digital fuel gauge as long as there was a manual check of the fuel in tanks and the computer was told the starting fuel.

The problem is that fuel trucks pump by volume and planes measure fuel by weight. The fueling truck converted the volume to kilograms and then converted to pounds. He should not have used both. In 1983 ground crews were used to converting volume to pounds. The 767 was the first plane in Air Canada's fleet to have metric fuel gauges.

The line in the video "the flight crew approved of the fuel without noticing the error" glosses over how it is actually done. The pilot was passed a form that contained the numbers and calculations from the ground crew that stated that 22,300 kg of fuel was loaded on the plane. The math was wrong, but unless the pilots re-did the numbers by hand, there wouldn't be anything to jump out at them. He accepted the form and punched those numbers in to the computer.

The 767 was one of the first planes to eliminate the Flight Engineer position and replace it with a computer. There was no clear owner as to who does the fuel calc in this situation. In this case, it fell to the ground crew.

>> I would hope there is a nit more of a warning system than the engines shutting off.

If there was a functional digital fuel gauge, it would have showed them missing half their fuel from the start, and the error would have been caught. Because there wasn't, the computer was calculating and displaying the amount of fuel based on an incorrect start value.

That is another problem with this video. It states that "they didn't even think about it until ... and an alarm went off signalling that their left engine had quit working."

Fuck you, narrator asshole.

In this case, low fuel pump pressure warnings were firing off before the engines shut down. They were investigating why they would be getting these low pressure warnings when their calculated fuel values (based on the original error) showed that they had enough fuel.

>> I can't believe the pilot's were given an award for causing an avoidable accident.

The pilots did not cause it. They followed all the proper procedures applicable at that time, 1983. It was only due to their skill and quick thinking that the pilots landed the plane without any serious injuries to passengers.

They ran simulations in Vancouver of this exact fuel and flight situation and all the crews that ran this simulation crashed their planes.

"Bad math can kill you." Flippant, correct, but still not quite applicable to this situation. Air Canada did not provide any conversion training for dealing with kilograms and the 767. Not the ground crew, nor the pilots, were trained how to handle it. They were expected to "figure it out". That, and the elimination of the Flight Engineer position, set these situations up for disaster.

Last night in my physics course we were learning how to find impedance due to inductors, capacitors, and resistors in an AC circuit and we had to learn a math that was new to me before last night. In that math lesson we went over the power series of e^x and found mathematically how e^(i*pi)=-1, or as it's more commonly shown e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0. I guess this is known to the math community as one of the most elegant equations due to it's complexity and it's purity. Pretty crazy...

Memristors /memˈrɪstɚ/ ("memory resistors") are a class of passive two-terminal circuit elements that maintain a functional relationship between the time integrals of current and voltage. This results in resistance varying according to the device's memristance function. Specifically engineered memristors provide controllable resistance useful for switching current. The memristor is a special case in so-called "memristive systems", a class of mathematical models useful for certain empirically observed phenomena, such as the firing of neurons.[3] The definition of the memristor is based solely on fundamental circuit variables, similar to the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. Unlike those more familiar elements, the necessarily nonlinear memristors may be described by any of a variety of time-varying functions. As a result, memristors do not belong to linear time-invariant (LTI) circuit models. A linear time-invariant memristor is simply a conventional resistor.[4]

Memristor theory was formulated and named by Leon Chua in a 1971 paper. Chua strongly believed that a fourth device existed to provide conceptual symmetry with the resistor, inductor, and capacitor. This symmetry follows from the description of basic passive circuit elements as defined by a relation between two of the four fundamental circuit variables, namely voltage, current, charge and flux.[5] A device linking charge and flux (themselves defined as time integrals of current and voltage), which would be the memristor, was still hypothetical at the time. He did acknowledge that other scientists had already used fixed nonlinear flux-charge relationships.[6] However, it would not be until thirty-seven years later, on April 30, 2008, that a team at HP Labs led by the scientist R. Stanley Williams would announce the discovery of a switching memristor. Based on a thin film of titanium dioxide, it has been presented as an approximately ideal device.[7][8][9] Being much simpler than currently popular MOSFET switches and also able to implement one bit of non-volatile memory in a single device, memristors integrated with transistors may enable nanoscale computer technology. Chua also speculates that they may be useful in the construction of artificial neural networks.[10]

Tags for this video have been changed from 'bjork, television, hypnotized, high voltage, capacitors, inductors, resisters' to 'bjork, television, hypnotized, high voltage, capacitors, inductors, resistors' - edited by Constitutional_Patriot