Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Canal, the Crash and the Ketamine - Pushkin's Reign of Error

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

In 1983, a plane takes off from Ottawa with less than half the required fuel on board. As the engines cut out one by one, the pilot is left with a ticking clock and an impossible task. But what does a tale of an unusual plane crash have in common with one about a disappearing canal? For this special episode, Tim is joined by colleagues from across Pushkin's podcast network. Heavyweight's Jonathan Goldstein stops by to muse on the cost of mistakes and whether we're really in control of how many we make. Plus, Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova from the podcast Risky Business give a gambler's take on the strange science of regret. Heavyweight and Risky Business are available wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. Hello, everyone.

Tim Harford here to tell you we have just launched a brand new cautionary club. It's on Patreon. and it's a space for you and the Cautionary Tales team to get to know each other. It's going to be full of exclusive bonus content. There'll be a full-length Cautionary Tales episode every month and there'll also be an exclusive conversation between me and one of the team. We're also writing a newsletter, which will drop into your mailbox full of the curiosities we uncovered while researching the show.

You'll be the first to know about upcoming events, plans for the show, and you'll get a chance to get your questions, questions and ideas to us. And of course, you'll have access to the entire archive ad-free. You'll also be supporting us and all of the work that goes into making the show. Head to patreon.com slash cautionary club to find out more. That's patreon.com slash cautionary club. Hello, this is Tim Harford here, host of Cautionary Tales, the show that tells you stories of catastrophes from the past and explores what we can learn from them.

Today, our podcast is taking over the Pushkin Network for a very special episode. I've invited some of the great and good from Pushkin to join me to give their take on the nature of mistakes and how we should think about them. Coming up, Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova hosts of risky business on regretting mistakes and the mistake of regrets. You see that people aren't afraid of regretting, selling a stock and then having it go up. They fear that more than they regret, you know, holding onto it and having it go down.

And then Jonathan Goldstein from Heavyweight muses with author Sheila Hetty about how we should feel about mistakes, based on her experiences with accidental ketamine, missing money, and a flying baby. I was on the ground and somebody threw me this child. And I remember thinking in that moment, you cannot drop this baby. But first, I want to kick things off with a classic cautionary tale, a strange happening in a canal.

It's 1978. A dredging gang working for British waterways are struggling with a stubborn problem on the picturesque Chesterfield Canal. They're trying to strengthen a section. of the canal's side wall, which means dredging away silt and removing submerged junk. That's not easy at the best of times. But what really has them stumped is a length of heavy iron chain. It's blocking their efforts and it simply refuses to budge.

Eventually the foreman calls in the dredging boat. The crew attaches a line to the chain and revs up the dredger's engines. It pulls, and it pulls. And at last, that does the trick. With a sharp tug, the chain finally comes unstuck. The crew remove it and the block of wood attached to it and then take a well-earned break for lunch. Lunch is rudely interrupted by a policeman in a state of some excitement.

He'd been passing the normally tranquil waterway when he could not help but notice a large whirlpool. By the time the crew returned to the scene, the canal has gone. All that remain are a number of stranded houseboats and pleasure cruisers, not to mention the dredger itself, wallowing in mud. Those, of course, and a plug-hole. The plug-hole had been installed by the designer of the Chesterfield Canal more than 200 years earlier,

but all records of it had been destroyed in a wartime fire in the 1940s. Since there were no dredging boats in 1775 when the canal was opened, it was designed to be easy to drain, in sections, to allow workers to jump in and shovel out the accumulated silt. This particular section was a mile and a half long and the entire stretch was now nothing but mud and the occasional rusted bicycle. The canal itself had gurgled off

to join the nearby river idle. One of the workmen explained we didn't know there was a plug. I first first, heard this story from the book that inspired the Cautionary Tales podcast, The World's Greatest Mistakes by Nigel Blundell. It's full of these kinds of stories that are funny or tragic, or both. I read it when I was a boy, and decades later, it's what inspired me to start making a podcast about mistakes and what we can learn from them. So what can we learn from a vanishing

canal? There's the obvious. If something's really, really hard to move, it might be wiser to leave it in place. There's another lesson too, but I'll come back to that later. Before that, it's time to introduce our first guests for the episode. Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova, hosts of the excellent podcast, Risky Business. Nate and Maria are dedicated to learning from mistakes, and their show is entirely about how to make better decisions. Nate is a statistician, Maria's a psychologist, and they're both journalists as well as high-stakes poker players. It's their business to have a keen sense of risk and reward. When I asked them for some insight about mistakes, Maria really wanted to talk about the power of one thing in particular.

Regret. Nate, are there any decisions lately that you didn't make and now you're just saying. experiencing a sense of regret because that's what we're going to talk about today. Psychology of regret and how it affects our decision-making. The things we didn't do, the risks we didn't take, the hands we did not play, the bluffs we did not run.

Inevitably, Maria, I started to think about poker hands, particularly a high-stakes poker hand that I played maybe six months ago, where this short version is that like a player made a bet that I thought was fairly likely to be a bluff. I had a weak hand but a hand that beat bluffs and I had a strong spidey sense that it was worth a call and I didn't call because like I talked myself out of it because the stakes were pretty high, right?

So that's like regret about like knowing the right play and not doing it. The stakes are high but not so high that I couldn't like afford to have been wrong by any means, right? So that one still sting six months later. It's always those ones that we regret and that we think about over and over and over. Yeah. Trying to avoid regret is something that can drive our decision making to an irrational

degree because it's a feeling that's not good, right? We don't like feeling regret. I definitely know that like when it comes to poker, for instance, I always think more about the hands where I didn't do something that I think I should have done than when I did something and it didn't work out, right? So if I, you know, run a bluff and I end up busting from a tournament, that's fine, right? I went for it and i don't really think twice about it when i think that it's a really good spot to bluff and i'm scared right because what if he has you know he calls me and has me beat and i don't bluff because of that kind of feeling that's what i think about i'm like you know had i just gone for it it might have been very very different it's that inaction rather than the action that actually motivates me

and stays with me as a bigger mistake. So I'm curious what you think about that. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty rare that I bust out of a tournament on a bluff and regret it. In fact, it's probably pretty rare in general that I bust out on a bluff, right? Like, I think, I take pride in having, I think, like, a pretty decent bluffing frequency,

at least relative to people's expectations of me, right? I can run small bluffs. I can run big bluffs. I can run creative bluffs, right? I probably miss some on, like, weird boards. but like probably not bluffing enough if that's the feeling right it's like sometimes i'll really regret like not firing a second or third barrel right so what that means if you're not a poker fan in the audience is like there are basically four streets in texas hold them so you can

actually kind of bluff at the pot four times and oftentimes you have to unload all your ammunition to do it you're you know getting all in probably right and the times when like you're like you've got a fire again and there's like this guilt people can feel like oh i just had you know it's like i just had a greasy burger yesterday i have to be very diligent today about like kind of what i eat and even when it's like evy to have the cheeseburger again basically yeah that's absolutely right you know there are so many different facets to this not just you know in the poker world but in broader decision making so if you think about something that's closely related to poker you know the investing world the finance world you see

see that people aren't afraid of regretting selling a stock and then having it go up. They fear that more than they regret, you know, holding onto it and having it go down, for instance. That's just one example. But you end up making these irrational decisions all the time because you don't want to miss out, right? It's kind of this fomo that's brought to life. And it is compounded with this fascinating psychological phenomenon, Nate, called the

endowment effect, which is. that when you already have something, it suddenly has much greater value than it did before you had it. Right. So one famous study is with a lottery ticket. I give you a lottery ticket and then, you know, say every lottery ticket has an exact same chance of winning. And they say, hey, Nate, do you want to swap lottery tickets with me? You're going to be irrationally averse to doing that because what happens if you swap and then I end up with the winning ticket? Shit, right? Like, that was yours and you don't think about what if I had the winning ticket and now you have it right like that's just as likely but that's not the way that the human brain works instead you're like

what if I'm giving up my winning ticket when you get something at auction you're not going to sell it for more than you bought it for right like you don't want to part with it it happens over and over and over because once it's yours it just acquires this irrational value so we have these two different things, right? We have this FOMO, we have this fear that, like, I'm going to regret what happens, and we have this endowment effect, and these two things

compound each other where we end up making really irrational choices, especially when it comes to taking risks. And even if you know this, this can actually be a really tough one to fight. And I think poker illustrates that very well, because I definitely, you know, still

have those spots where I won't do something. or like where I'll make an irrational decision, even though I know what I'm doing. And I bet that after we record this, I am going to still make one of those errors, right? And poker's a game, right? So in a lot of sense,

it should be easier for me to avoid that sort of regret aversion when I'm playing poker. But when in real life, you know, it's even harder. And even in poker, I can't avoid it. Yeah, I mean, there's this particular one, two, that you get in kind of investing or sports betting for that matter, right? Which is when you invest in something and don't invest enough, right? Yeah.

And don't invest enough, right? Like I had an investment I made six months ago that like, I think it's a good investment. Not a small investment, but like I could have invested more and I wish I had now based on the performance of the company. It's like things like that can also produce regret, but that reflects hindsight bias, you know. Yeah, absolutely. And hindsight bias definitely comes into play in regret all. the time. It's kind of what I was saying at the beginning, that regret is one of those emotions that takes outcome into, or potential outcome kind of into its calculus, right? And we shouldn't be doing

that. So one of the things, Nate, that you and I stress over and over is when you're making good decisions, you can't be outcome oriented, right? You have to separate yourself from the outcome of the decision. You have to just think through the process, right? Am I making this decision for the correct reasons, right? Is my expected value calculation rational? Am I using the correct inputs, the correct factors? Am I weighting them correctly? Am I, you know, calibrating my confidence levels correctly, right? So if you think about the poker hand, like, am I thinking through, do I have the right combination? Is this the right board? Am I in the right situation, right? All of these different things to bluff or two-fold or whatever it is, right? So I can't be thinking, well, you know,

what if I get called and I bust right and yet we think about that we end up being way to results oriented and the regret can kick in after the fact right so we might have made a rational decision and then feel regret about it afterwards because it ended up not going well right oh if only i had folded pre-flop if only i had done this like that that kind of counterfactual is very hindsight driven very results driven and being results driven and remembering and kind of dwelling on results is just the polar opposite of what we want to be doing when we're making good decisions.

With the exception that sometimes you pick up additional information that testifies to how accurate your thesis was, right? Let's say I'm playing poker, and I think this opponent's, we have a dynamic. We're rivals, and he's a big calling station. So I'm going to make a big all-in four-bed or five-bet with pocket aces because I think he'll call down as light as like

ace queen off suit and stuff like that, right? And then they tank and tank and tank and they barely call with kings or queens, right? Then your thesis was wrong, right? That person actually was terrified by you. They probably had a very strong hand and or you gave something away physically with the way you played the hand, right?

That's when you might go back and say, I made a re-blaced deviation and it didn't work out that well. That's a good caveat. out. That's how we want to use outcomes, right? We want to use them as a way of calibrating our decision process in that particular sense, as opposed to, you know, did it go well for me or did it go poorly for me? So to kind of summarize here, right, more people more often than not are paralyzed by regret or by the anticipation of future regret, and it makes and make worse decisions, right? the time when regret is most appropriate, I think,

or when you knew a decision was bad and you did it anyway, right? Then I think you really have to do some kind of like life coaching self-diagnosis or professional diagnosed with yourself or like why that happened, right? And then the one exception of being results oriented is when your thesis was wrong, right? And maybe you get the right outcome anyway, but like subsequent events prove that your thesis is wrong. And that's, you know, again,

and we don't have perfect information either. It's not just that there's uncertainty, it's that we have incomplete information. But sometimes when you book a win, you forget about it. You can learn a lot from wins too. Yes, absolutely. And I would wrap this up with one more thing, which is that we should also remember that, you know,

you can regret doing something, but you can also regret not doing something, right? So the choice not to act, the choice to kind of maintain status quo is also a choice that can also lead to a lot of regret. And both of these things, both what you're talking about, Nate, and kind of the status quo bias, these can both lead us to irrational choices because of kind of the desire to minimize regret. That's Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova, hosts of risky business.

The lesson I'm getting here is that our fear of making mistakes can, ironically, lead us to making some bad choices. One choice you won't regret is sticking around to hear the host of heavyweight. Jonathan Goldstein talk with Sheila Hetty about some of the biggest mistakes she's ever made. It's 5.23 p.m. One of your kids is asking for a snack. Another is building a fort out of your clean laundry. And you're staring at a half-empty fridge and thinking, what are we even going to eat tonight? Or you could just hello fresh it. With over 80 recipes to choose from every week, including kid-friendly ones, even for picky eaters, you'll get fresh ingredients and easy step-by-step recipes delivered right to your door.

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Hello, everyone. Tim Harford here to tell you we have just launched a brand-new cautionary club. It's on Patreon, and it's a space for you and the cautionary. The Cautionary Tales team to get to know each other. It's going to be full of exclusive bonus content. There'll be a full-length Cautionary Tales episode every month and there'll also be an exclusive conversation between me and one of the team. We're also writing a newsletter which will drop into your mailbox

full of the curiosities we uncovered while researching the show. You'll be the first to know about upcoming events, plans for the show and you'll get a chance to get your questions and ideas to us. and, of course, you'll have access to the entire archive ad-free. You'll also be supporting us, and all of the work that goes into making the show. Head to patreon.com slash cautionary club to find out more. That's patreon.com slash cautionary club. Welcome back to this special edition of Cautionary Tales with me, Tim Harford.

Do you know the show, heavyweight? It's another great one in the Pushkin. network. The host Jonathan Goldstein helps people resolve problems from their pasts. Often, that means coming to terms with their own mistakes. If you haven't heard the show, let me recommend the episode called Gregor. It's about a man who wants some CDs back, and it sounds mundane I know, but trust me, it isn't. For this special mistakes episode, Jonathan wanted to talk to his friend, writer Sheila Hetty, who's probably best known for her book called Motherhood. Sheila, hi, how are you?

Yeah, nice to see you. Yeah, nice to see you too. Just as a glimpse, for a glimpse behind the curtain, before we got on, we were texting a little bit. And you had said, and this is a part of my gotcha journalism stylings, you had said that you've never made a mistake. I was joking. How do you define a mistake, or do you? I guess I think a mistake is something. that you did with little thought

that if you had put more thought into it, you would have made a different decision. Is there a difference between a regret? You see, I traffic and regret. That's my lingua franca. That's my bread and butter. My metier. Is there a difference between a mistake and a regret?

Yeah, I think you can regret anything, mistake or not. I mean, you can regret things that were even, by all accounts, the best thing you could have done in that situation. Maybe that's a better way of putting in it. Do you ever use that button, you know, that button on the email thing where you could take back your email? Yes, often.

Really? I wish they left it for about a minute, though. It disappears too fast. Yeah, it does. It's almost like it's worthless. Maybe an hour. Is there a setting where you could play with that, where you can make it like last an hour?

No. Well, maybe there is. I think though sometimes you want to do things impulsively like I sent an email to somebody recently and then afterwards I thought why did I send that but I think I sent it because if I thought about it I wouldn't have sent it Was there any particular mistake that came to mind

in thinking about all of these this lifetime of mistakes? Yeah well I applied for a grant from the Canada Council and I gave them an old email address and then they wrote me and they said we have $50,000 for you, you got the grant and I've only noticed that email because I checked my old email address. I remembered, oh, I had this old email address

and I checked it. And I had like six emails for them saying, if you don't reply by this date, we're not giving you the grant. And it was two months in the past. And I'd lost the money because I'd given them this old email address. And I thought I was completely broke. I had no money. And I thought I just lost $50,000 because I did this stupid thing of not forwarding my emails. to my new address because I would have had to pay. And at the time, I thought, why should I pay to forward my emails from this old address? And that was a really, that just felt like a heart-stopping mistake.

Like, how could I just lost this money like that? Wow, that's, that's, how long ago was this? Two months ago? And have you inquired? Have you looked into it? Yeah. I called, I emailed. I was like, I'm so sorry, this is an old email address.

I don't even know why I gave it. this old email address it was i applied so long ago you know i didn't realize that da da da da and then they were able to give it to me but if i had checked like a week later i they wouldn't have been able to reverse it so that was just like that's a kind of carelessness which is common for me to be that careless but it's never felt like it would have cost me such a i mean the cost of that mistake would have been much worse than most of the mistakes i've made not including emotional mistakes. I'm really glad to hear that you were able to solve it. In that space where you thought though that it was unsolvable and you just lost 50,000 Canadian dollars, what was the feeling?

Shame. Just shame. Was there any attempt towards redemption? Like I'm going to make this into a story or I'm going to dine out on this story to all my friends. No, I was just like I can't even tell my partner. I can't tell anyone about this. Like, this is just too careless. This is too stupid. This is, this has gone too far. Like, my carelessness has gone too far. And I just felt like, how can I, I was kind of like aghast at myself. Like, I can't go on living this way with, with, with, in such a, it's like not reading the instructions. Oh, that's another mistake I've made. Recently, I was going to do ketamine therapy for this article that I'm writing. And they said, swish the ketamine around in your mouth and hold it there for 15 minutes and then spit it out.

I'm in this clinic. And, you know, I taped the whole thing, audio tape the whole thing so I could transcribe it later what I said on ketamine. And I switched it around in my mouth for about 30 seconds and then I swallowed it. And the nurse and the therapist looked at me like, we told you three times to swish it around your mouth for 15 minutes and then spit it out. And I was like, you never said that. You never said that and the nurse was going to say lots of people make that mistake but then she had to catch herself and then she couldn't say lots of people made that mistake because everyone had heard that instruction swish it around for 15 minutes and spit it out and then I listened to the tape when I got home and they did say that twice swish it around your mouth 15 minutes and spit it out and I

completely didn't hear it and they they couldn't get me stressed out about it because otherwise I'd have this horrible trip so they're like oh it's okay it's okay oh it's okay dear you know that you did that. So this is the kind of like mistake that I make all the time. Just like not listening to instructions, not paying attention, thinking I know everything. I don't need to listen to the instructions. Wow. Wow. Had anybody ever done that before in the history of their clinic? I mean, it was fine. I just had like, you just weren't supposed to do that. That's not how it's supposed to do. Do you swallow mouthwash after you gargle with it? No. Okay. But the situation With the grant, once you found out that you lost it,

I kind of liken that feeling to when I'm, like, say, carrying a bowl of cereal from the kitchen to the couch. And I feel like I'm losing my grasp. It's going to fall. I'm tripping. Time slows down. And I'm just like, fuck it. Fuck it all. And it's almost like a very self-punishing sort of feeling of like, you deserve this.

I'm going to really wallow in this. Like I practically like throw the bowl of cereal out of my hands against the wall to make it as terrible as possible. Is there a bit of masochism? Not in the Grant one, but what you just said reminds me of a time that I didn't make a mistake, which I was in some gallery, art gallery in Toronto. And I don't know how this happened,

but I had this feeling like somebody threw me there, baby. It was like a child. Like I was on the ground and somebody threw me this child. and I leaned backwards and kind of like fell backwards to catch it. And I remember thinking in that moment, you cannot drop this baby. And I didn't. And I remember feeling like most situations in life, there is this margin of who cares if I drop the cereal or not? And it made me realize that in most situations, I would like, like you throw the cereal against the wall.

And I was just like, this is not one of those times. You have to put every cell into catching that baby properly. whereas most of the time you put half the cells into like catching the baby or like letting the cereal not fall on the other half into letting it fall and you kind of leave it to chance whether you drop the cereal or the baby or not but I was like this is not one of those times and so it didn't mean me realize like how permissive I am of mistakes in general because I was like this is not like all those other times no this is a great point but we just need to rewind a little bit for those

who maybe aren't as into the Canadian conceptual art scene where people walk into galleries and have babies thrown at them what what happened it was like a social i don't even know if a show was going on it was a bunch of artists hanging around and how could somebody throw a baby it wasn't a baby it was like a one year two year it was like it was a somewhere between baby and toddler but they threw they threw a human being at you something happened that i had to catch a child i don't really the the emotion in trying to catch the child the resources that my body put towards catching the child were so intense that I forgot how that situation actually unfolded. But somehow there was a child. It was with one person. I wish I could explain

it better. No, no, I think I'm getting it. I mean, I really like the conclusion, which is sort of like you realize that mistakes are a luxury sometimes. Like if you just feel like there is no margin for error that you can't, you just can't allow yourself that. Then you just can't, then you you don't. Yeah, and it was pretty much the only time in my life where I ever felt like there is no margin forever. If you don't catch this baby, it'll split its head open and die. I was like, you cannot. And I think it made me realize how usually I'm like, yeah, maybe I'll catch that mistake or maybe I won't. Maybe I'll let the cereal fall. Who cares? Like, yeah, exactly. Like you say, the mistakes are kind of a luxury. Does that suggest that you can avoid mistakes if you

try hard enough? I think that's what most people would believe. How hard do you think you personally? How hard do you think a person should try? I don't know. I don't, I probably don't try that hard because I figure things will work out in the end. You do feel that way. Yeah. I have a basic optimistic feeling about my life and I'm basically an optimistic person. So maybe that's why I don't try so hard to avoid mistakes. I figure, oh, everything's going to work out. So I swallowed the And, I mean, like, I had a bit of a hangover the next day and the day after from it. Like, I felt really tired. But, like, I'm not going to die.

Like, if I was going to die, they wouldn't have given it you to swirl in your mouth, you know? They have to take into account that people aren't going to listen all the time, and they don't deserve to die because of it. So how do you, or do you make peace with a mistake? Just make a new one. There's a new season of heavyweight out now, and you can find a link to it in this episode's show notes. Now, don't go anywhere.

When we get back from the break, I've got one last cautionary tale for you. It's 5.23 p.m. One of your kids is asking for a snack. Another is building a fort out of your clean laundry, and you're staring at a half-empty free. and thinking, what are we even going to eat tonight? Or you could just hello fresh it.

With over 80 recipes to choose from every week, including kid-friendly ones, even for picky eaters, you'll get fresh ingredients and easy step-by-step recipes delivered right to your door. No, last-minute grocery runs. No, what do we even have, fridge staring? And the best part, you're in total control. Skip a week, pause anytime, pick what works for you.

It's dinner on your terms. The kids can even help you cook. Yeah, it's going to. be messy. But somehow they tend to eat the vegetables they made themselves. Try Hellofresh today and get 50% off the first box with free shipping. Go to Hellofresh.com

and use promo code Yum50. That's Hellofresh.ca promo promo code Yum 50. Hellofresh.com.com. Hellofresh. Canada's number one meal kit delivery service. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts

than add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. Hello, everyone. Tim Harford here to tell you we have just launched a brand-new cautionary club. It's on Patreon, and it's a space for you and the Cautionary Tales team to get to know each other.

It's going to be full of exclusive bonus content. There'll be a full-length Cautionary Tales episode every month, and there'll also be an exclusive conversation between me and one of the team. We're also writing a newsletter, which will drop into your mailbox full of the curiosities we uncovered while researching the show. You'll be the first to know about upcoming events, plans for the show and you'll get a chance to get your questions and ideas to us and of course you'll have access to the entire archive ad-free

you'll also be supporting us and all of the work that goes into making the show head to patreon.com slash cautionary club to find out more that's patreon.com slash cautionary club welcome back to this special edition of cautionary tales with me tim Harford. And now, for what will hopefully be our final mistake this episode, I've got a cautionary tale for you. Passengers on Air Canada Flight 143 had the pleasure of flying on a brand new Boeing 767, albeit a Boeing 67, with a brand new dodgy fuel gauge. The airline knew that the fuel gauge

was unreliable, so Captain Bob Pearson and his crew needed to manually calculate how much fuel the plane needed to get from Montreal to Edmonton, plus the usual reserve. Unfortunately, Air Canada, like Canada itself, was in the slow and confusing process for switching from imperial to metric units. Most of the planes were set up and labelled for imperial measures, but this new plane wasn't. The upshot of all this confusion was that the plane was actually fuelled up not with 22,600 kilograms of fuel,

but with 22,600 pounds, less than half of what was intended. How, how, how did this happen? Well, the manual check didn't use any measure as clear as kilograms. Instead, the crew needed to convert a dipstick measure in centimetres into a volume in litres into a mass in kilograms or pounds. That required a conversion factor,

and the conversion factor supplied to the refuelers and written on all the older planes was the old one for pounds, not the new one for kilograms. Did you get that? Air Canada hadn't made it clear in any case whose job it was to do all this arithmetic. In the old planes, it would be the third flight crew member, the flight engineer.

But this new plane just had a pilot and a co-pilot. And neither of them had been trained to do this tricky task. One mechanical technician tried and gave up. Another got most of the way through but ran out a room on the slip of paper he was using. He decided to leave it to the pilot and co-pilot. Did I mention that neither of them had been trained to perform the calculation? You might think that this story was doomed to end in disaster. But this is a very special story.

There's a lucky twist. The plane was scheduled to make a short hop down to Ottawa to pick up more passengers before making the long journey west to Edmonton with a dangerously low level of fuel. And during that stopover, Captain Pearson, wary of his disconnected fuel gauge, decided to double-check the fuel levels.

few. Alas, there is an unlucky twist to the lucky twist. In Ottawa, the flight crew still untrained and still supplied with confusing conversion factors mixed up metric and imperial units in exactly the same way. Flight 143 duly took off for Edmonton

without enough fuel to get it anywhere near, its destination. In the cockpit, the first hint of trouble came almost halfway to Edmonton. Four short, sharp beeps. A totally unfamiliar alarm. Meaning what? Left-forward fuel pump had failed? Hmm.

That's odd. Captain Pearson flicked through the manual. There were six of these pumps, so losing one was no disaster, except a second pump had failed. Now, both of the left-hand fuel tank pumps were out of action. Oh, fuck, said Captain Pearson. He gave the order to divert to the nearest major airport, Winnipeg. Hopefully at Winnipeg they could figure out what had gone wrong in the left-hand fuel tank.

Winnipeg Centre, Air Canada 143. Canada, 143, go ahead. Yes, sir, we have a problem. Captain Pearson knew that if there was a problem with the left fuel tank, the left engine might also fail. Landing with only one engine, it wouldn't be easy. They were 128 miles north of Winnipeg. Pearson began a slow descent.

And then... four more beeps, and another four. And a moment later, Pearson and his crew realised that all six fuel pumps had failed. Pearson told the flight crew to prepare for an emergency landing at Winnipeg. Minutes ticked by. Captain Pearson and his colleagues still hadn't quite real. realized how serious the situation was. They were in the middle of a gradual descent,

but that meant losing height they would soon wish they hadn't lost. The last of those aggressive four beeps sounded. Number one engine cut out. Then the number two engine. And if you were wondering about number three engine, there wasn't a number three engine. But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst of it was when, very shortly afterwards,

every light in the cockpit went out. The electricity in a Boeing 767 comes from a generator powered by the engines. Bob Pearson hadn't just lost his engines. He'd lost all his instruments, and he'd lost the flaps and slats, the rudder and the ailerons. even the undercarriage.

Captain Pearson was now in complete control of the airplane as long as he didn't want to speed up, break, change altitude, change direction, stay airborne or land. There were two glimmers of hope. The plane was equipped with an emergency air turbine, effectively a windmill that could be dropped into place near one of the wheels and used the wind whistling past the fuselage to supply a little bit of electrical power. The flight crew flipped to the manual, found the procedure and unlocked the emergency turbine.

The lights flickered back on, and Captain Pearson now had some limited control. Most of the controls no longer worked, but by pulling hard on the sticks, like a driver of a car with power steering disconnected, Pearson could change the elevation and direction of the plane. What a shame he didn't have any engines. The co-pilot relayed the news to Winnipeg, asking them to clear the area and get the emergency cruise ready. But it wasn't clear how the plane would even aim at Winnipeg,

let alone travel 65 miles to reach it, or is that 104 kilometres, whatever, as Pearson hastily calculated his rate of descent, he realised there was absolutely no way they could glide all the way to Winnipeg. And the second glimmer? A Boeing 767 might be a terrible glider, but Captain Bob Pearson was an excellent glider pilot.

Kimley Motorsports Park, hosts a drag strip, a carting track, a motorcross track, and a long racetrack. The racetrack is so long because it used to be a base for the Royal Canadian Air Force. The Air Force base had closed back in 1971, and by 1983, it had been a bustling home for motorsports for more than a decade. On July the 23rd, 1983, Gimley Motorsports Park was hosting a family day, featuring races on the old runway, The area around the decommissioned runway was bustling with campervans, tents and cars. Children were riding their bikes up and down the tarmac.

None of this, alas, was known to the crew of Air Canada 143 or to air traffic control at Winnipeg. Why would it? It's not as if the Winnipeg Sports Car Club is in the habit of sharing their timetable with Air Canada after all. But up in the cockpit, Captain Pearson's co-pilot had suggested trying to glide in and land on the old Gimley airstrip. It wasn't even listed as a possible landing strip, but the co-pilot had been stationed there as an Air Force officer years before. And there was nowhere else they could reach. As the plane descended towards the airstrip, the crew tried to manually lower and lock.

the undercarriage. With the front wheel fighting against the wind, they didn't succeed. Swooping out of the Canadian skies towards the only strip of concrete they could find, a safe landing seemed an almost impossible dream. The plane was hard to control, very much at risk of touching down one wingtip or another and flipping into a fatal cartwheel. It was traveling too fast, and there was no obvious way to slow its descent. And if they did land, there were no ambulances or fire crews at the old Gimley Air Force Base. In fact, as far as Captain Pearson and his team knew, there was nobody at Gimley at all. It was at about this point that Pearson noticed three children on bicycles in the middle of the runway ahead of him.

Bicycles or no bicycles, Pearson was coming in too quickly and if he couldn't slow down, everyone in the plane was doomed. He tried a manoeuvre that was common enough with gliders but seemed absurd in a passenger jet. Using all his might to move the stubborn controls, he used the ailerons on the wings to steer the plane left and the rudder to steer the plane right. The plane's nose pointed left, its tail stuck out to the right,

but the plane itself kept moving straight forward. It had entered a side slip, the aerial equivalent of a skid. The stunt dramatically increased the drag on the plane, which slowed and flocked out of the sky. The curious thing about a glider, is that it doesn't make a lot of noise. This is true, even if the glider happens to be a Boeing 767. The happy families camping at the far end of the runway

got their first warning that they were about to have an unusual family day at Gimley Motorsports Park when they heard a bang and an unholy scraping sound from down the racetrack. There, in the distance, in a flurry of spark, and a cloud of white smoke was a Boeing 767. The three boys on bicycles were peddling furiously towards them,

yelling something indistinct but urgent. And then, a moment later, that Boeing 767 wasn't in the distance anymore. It was sliding down the runway towards them all very, very fast. The plane's undercarriage had collapsed. which turned out to be a blessing in disguise, the plane stopped short.

The inflatable slides were deployed. The passengers, sobbing with relief or stunned into silence, scrambled off the plane to find themselves the new main attraction of a family motorsport festival, with carters hurrying up with portable fire extinguishers. But there wasn't any fuel left to catch fire. Passengers leaving on the rear slides suffered a painful landing because the back of the plane was sticking up in an undignified fashion

and the slides weren't quite long enough. But nobody either in the plane or on the ground suffered serious harm. But this is cautionary tales. We can't just say they all lived happily ever after. We need to learn a lesson from this fiasco. And perhaps it's this. Organizational memory matters. Just as British Waterways had long ago forgotten

that the Chesterfield Canal had plugs, Air Canada had forgotten that sometimes you need to calculate a fuel load manually. The flight engineers who once had to do the job no longer existed, so it was nobody in particular's responsibility to get the job right. Not to mention that the doctor, The documentation made the task extremely challenging. Doing a complex piece of arithmetic suddenly became a matter of life and death, and the crew had forgotten how to do it.

Thank goodness that Captain Pearson hadn't forgotten how to glide. He managed to get his malfunctioning passenger aircraft to fly 40 miles without fuel to touch down within 800 feet of the start of a short 6,800-foot airstrip and to make that touchdown, if not gentle, then shall we say, decisive? Other pilots have been given this scenario to try out in a flight simulator. The usual result is a catastrophic crash. There is a whole catalogue of cautionary tales, full of epic mistakes that I hope we can all learn from.

And if you're all caught up on those stories, we've just launched a cautionary club, with bonus episodes every month, regular updates from me, and a newsletter that includes some extra curiosities. I hope you'll sign up at patreon.com slash cautionary club. This episode was written by me, Tim Harford,

and produced by Georgia Mills and Isaac Carter, with help from Marilyn Rust. Thanks also to Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova from Risky Business, Jonathan Goldstein from heavyweight, and his special guest, Sheila Hetty. This episode was edited by Sarah Nix. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller.

Hello everyone, Tim Harford here to tell you we have just launched a brand new cautionary club. It's on Patreon and it's a space for you. the Cautionary Tales team to get to know each other. It's going to be full of exclusive bonus content. There'll be a full-length Cautionary Tales episode every month and there'll also be an exclusive conversation between me and one of the team. We're also writing a newsletter, which will drop into your mailbox full of the curiosities we uncovered while researching the show. You'll be the first to know about upcoming events, plans for the show, and you'll get a chance to get your questions and ideas to us and of course

you'll have access to the entire archive ad-free. You'll also be supporting us and all of the work that goes into making the show. Head to patreon.com slash cautionary club to find out more.

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