A decade ago, Joyent accidentally rebooted an entire datacenter, an experience that I described in my 2017 GOTO Chicago talk, "Debugging Under Fire":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30jNsCVLpAE
On the next Oxide and Friends, @ahl we will be joined by folks who were at Joyent a decade ago, both to recall the fateful outage and to reflect on its ramifications, both at Joyent and beyond. Join us, Monday, 5p Pacific:
Great talk. In case anybody might think the Gimli glider was a single type event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airline_flights_that_required_gliding
And wanting to make sure Canada remains a leader here In 2001 Air Transat 236 from Canada ran out of fuel due to shockingly bad maintenance decisions and very poor flight crew diagnosis of the problem.
Your description of a B767 as "a brick" is a bit off. The B767 has a L/D max (best case glide ratio) of ~20:1. The aircraft is designed to glide and be landable if needed. That does not take away from the wonderful job the flight crew did here to get that aircraft on the ground.
B767 and other airliners actually have better glide ratios than many light aircraft. But things are greatly harder due to the high energy, and very complex systems involved...
... many single engine light aircraft have L/D max as low as ~ 7:1-8:1. It is not hard to fly those, it's done by pilots all the time in simulated engine failures during training. I'd not describe those flying like a brick either. (Interestingly the glide ratio of many light aircraft is significantly degraded by the propeller windmilling).
Again, not to take away from the skills here but the B767 was not a brick. It likely helped that the Gimli captain was an experienced glider pilot.
Bryan Cantrill
Darryl Ramm