July 1, 2025 • 10 mins
Curiosities take flight today on your tour through the Cabinet.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
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 Curiosities. In a heavily industrialized world,
(00:38):
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 write. In the same way,
(01:00):
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 twenty
second of nineteen eighty three, Air Canada Flight one P
forty three was preparing to take off from Montreal when
(01:22):
the flight crew ran into a snag. The plane was
a Boeing seven sixty seven, 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
(01:44):
day for replacement parts to arrive, but Pearson did not
want to wait. There were sixty one passengers relying on him. Ultimately,
the pilots decided to measure the fuel manually, doing the
math to convert the weight of the fuel into leaders
one point seven seven pounds per lead, and then they
took off the following day for an estimated flight time
of four and a half hours. At forty one thousand feet,
(02:06):
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 lighter than they should be.
Then the engines started to shut down. When the first one.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
Stalled out, the pilots called air traffic control, requesting to
divert to Winnipeg. When the second engine failed, they realized
that they weren't even going to make it that far.
Their plane was no longer flying, it was just gliding.
Captain Pearson had experience with gliders, but there's a steep
difference between your average glider and a Boeing seven sixty seven.
(02:40):
The closest airstrip, twelve miles from them was a former
Royal Canadian Air Force base in Gimli, Manitoba. The only
problem was that it had been decommissioned and one of
the runways had since been converted into a motor park.
Neither the pilots nor the air traffic controllers were aware
of this, though they only knew that there was a
runway barely close enough for them to reach. As the
(03:03):
plane sailed toward the air strip, systems continued to fail,
Pearson's control of the airplane was limited to manual. The
weight of the aircraft was fighting against the pilot's efforts
to keep it level, banking hard against air currents. Meanwhile,
on the ground, the Winnipeg sports Car Club was holding
an amateur sports car race on the track that had
(03:23):
once been Gimley's second airstrip. From the ground, the motorists
saw a plane plummeting toward their position at an awkward angle. Terrified,
they promptly fled across the field. The next problem, while
the plane was going too fast for a safe landing,
Pierson would have to decelerate and fast, otherwise they would
skid past the runway and crash. When they touched down,
(03:45):
Pearson immediately slammed on the brakes, causing some of the
landing gear tires to violently blow out From the friction,
The plane careened forward, skidding across the landing strip for
almost three thousand feet before finally coming to a haul,
its nose down and tail in the air. The passengers
survived with minor injuries. In the aftermath of what would
(04:07):
become known as the Gimli Glider incident, a review determined
that the plane, on top of having a non functional
fuel gauge, didn't have any fuel in its tanks. This
was puzzling to the crew, who had accounted for this.
They'd eventually learned that the problem was a mathematical one.
The gauges in the new Boeing seven sixty seven measured
its fuel weight based on the metric system. The first
(04:30):
plane in Canadian airspace to do so, so, the formula
that Pearson's crew used to calculate the weight was incorrect.
They should have accounted forer point eight kilograms per leter
rather than one point seven seven pounds. Both Pearson and
his co pilot were reprimanded for their error, but in
a sense, the passengers were fortunate to have them. Pearson's
(04:51):
experience flying gliders ensured their safe landing, and the co
pilot had suggested Gimli Runway despite it not being an
active air base. Looking back, it's clear that they had
the perfect set of skills to account for their own errors.
We should all be so lucky. The thing about airport
(05:23):
security is that they're trained to spot a lie. They'll
notice in an instant if your palms are sweating, if
you avoid eye contact, if any part of your story
doesn't add up. Fooling them doesn't just require nerves of steel.
It takes an Oscar worthy performance. It was a chilly
January morning in Tehran and the airport was buzzing with
tense energy. Lines of stiff backed travelers inched through security,
(05:47):
speaking to one another, enclipped sentences while pretending not to
notice the machine gun toting soldiers hosted at every corner
in this scene. Walk to a group of filmmakers, you
could spot them a mile away, not because they were glamorous,
but because they were not. The filmmakers were the most
aggressively casual people in the terminal, sporting bell bottom jeans,
(06:08):
shaggy California haircuts, and oversized sunglasses. They carried bulging suitcases,
a few tattered movie scripts, and the kind of self
importance that you typically only find in Hollywood. The leader,
a man with a questionable mustache and an armful of
rolled up movie posters, stepped forward first. The name on
his paperwork was Kevin Costa Harkins, and, as he explained
(06:31):
to the Iranian immigration officer, he was a Canadian film producer.
He and his crew had spent the last few days
scouting locations for an upcoming sci fi epic that they
hoped to shoot in Iran's other worldly deserts. The officer
inspected Kevin's Canadian passport with the slow, deliberate suspicion of
a man who had heard every excuse in the book
(06:52):
and trusted none of them. And to be fair, he
had good reason to be skeptical. Iran was embroiled in revolution,
and tensions between the country and the West had never
been higher. A few months earlier, in November of nineteen
seventy nine, a group of Iranian students had stormed the
American embassy in Tehran and took more than fifty diplomats hostage.
(07:14):
Since then, the city had become one of the most
dangerous places in the world for Americans. Many Western countries
shuddered their embassies, warning their expats in the country to
get out as soon as they could. But Kevin and
his film crew had apparently not taken that advice. As
he explained to the immigration officer, movies couldn't wait for politics.
(07:34):
They had art to make, and besides, they were Canadian,
not American. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the
official stamped Kevin's passport, slid it back across the counter,
and waved him through. One by one. The others followed.
They held their breaths until the last boarding pass was checked,
the cabin doors closed, and the wheels finally lifted off
(07:56):
Iranian soil. Seated in coach with champagne trembling in paper cups,
the group exchanged shaky smiles They couldn't believe what they
had just pulled off, because they weren't filmmakers. They weren't
even Canadian. They were six American diplomats running for their lives.
During the chaos of the embassy attack in November, a
(08:16):
handful of Americans had managed to slip away. For months,
they'd hid inside the homes of Canadian diplomats, including the
Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor, who risked his life protecting them.
Working together, Canadian officials and the CIA brainstormed and discarded
countless plans to bring the diplomats home. It was Tony Mendez,
(08:38):
a CIA officer posing as Kevin, who suggested smuggling them
out on a commercial plane. He concocted the lie about
a sci fi film shooting in the Iranian desert, and
had ads for it printed in Iranian newspapers to lend
it legitimacy. Meanwhile, the Canadian embassy provided fake passports and
exit visas. The plan's only weak point was that it
(08:59):
read respired the diplomats to lie their way past Iranian
immigration officials without slipping. They weren't trained spies or actors,
and if they faltered for even a second, it would
mean prison or worse. Instead, they gave the performance of
a lifetime history remembers their daring escape as the Canadian Caper.
The Canadians just called it helping out a friend in
(09:22):
need in Hollywood. Well, they eventually made a movie about
the event. It's called Argo, after the fictional sci fi
film concocted by the CIA. Oh and just like the
performance that inspired the movie, it too proved to be
Oscar worthy. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of
(09:44):
the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey
in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another a
award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series,
and television show, and you can learn all about it
(10:06):
over at Theworldoflore dot com.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
And until next time, stay curious.
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
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 Curiosities. In a heavily industrialized world,
(00:38):
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 write. In the same way,
(01:00):
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 twenty
second of nineteen eighty three, Air Canada Flight one P
forty three was preparing to take off from Montreal when
(01:22):
the flight crew ran into a snag. The plane was
a Boeing seven sixty seven, 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
(01:44):
day for replacement parts to arrive, but Pearson did not
want to wait. There were sixty one passengers relying on him. Ultimately,
the pilots decided to measure the fuel manually, doing the
math to convert the weight of the fuel into leaders
one point seven seven pounds per lead, and then they
took off the following day for an estimated flight time
of four and a half hours. At forty one thousand feet,
(02:06):
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 lighter than they should be.
Then the engines started to shut down. When the first one.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
Stalled out, the pilots called air traffic control, requesting to
divert to Winnipeg. When the second engine failed, they realized
that they weren't even going to make it that far.
Their plane was no longer flying, it was just gliding.
Captain Pearson had experience with gliders, but there's a steep
difference between your average glider and a Boeing seven sixty seven.
(02:40):
The closest airstrip, twelve miles from them was a former
Royal Canadian Air Force base in Gimli, Manitoba. The only
problem was that it had been decommissioned and one of
the runways had since been converted into a motor park.
Neither the pilots nor the air traffic controllers were aware
of this, though they only knew that there was a
runway barely close enough for them to reach. As the
(03:03):
plane sailed toward the air strip, systems continued to fail,
Pearson's control of the airplane was limited to manual. The
weight of the aircraft was fighting against the pilot's efforts
to keep it level, banking hard against air currents. Meanwhile,
on the ground, the Winnipeg sports Car Club was holding
an amateur sports car race on the track that had
(03:23):
once been Gimley's second airstrip. From the ground, the motorists
saw a plane plummeting toward their position at an awkward angle. Terrified,
they promptly fled across the field. The next problem, while
the plane was going too fast for a safe landing,
Pierson would have to decelerate and fast, otherwise they would
skid past the runway and crash. When they touched down,
(03:45):
Pearson immediately slammed on the brakes, causing some of the
landing gear tires to violently blow out From the friction,
The plane careened forward, skidding across the landing strip for
almost three thousand feet before finally coming to a haul,
its nose down and tail in the air. The passengers
survived with minor injuries. In the aftermath of what would
(04:07):
become known as the Gimli Glider incident, a review determined
that the plane, on top of having a non functional
fuel gauge, didn't have any fuel in its tanks. This
was puzzling to the crew, who had accounted for this.
They'd eventually learned that the problem was a mathematical one.
The gauges in the new Boeing seven sixty seven measured
its fuel weight based on the metric system. The first
(04:30):
plane in Canadian airspace to do so, so, the formula
that Pearson's crew used to calculate the weight was incorrect.
They should have accounted forer point eight kilograms per leter
rather than one point seven seven pounds. Both Pearson and
his co pilot were reprimanded for their error, but in
a sense, the passengers were fortunate to have them. Pearson's
(04:51):
experience flying gliders ensured their safe landing, and the co
pilot had suggested Gimli Runway despite it not being an
active air base. Looking back, it's clear that they had
the perfect set of skills to account for their own errors.
We should all be so lucky. The thing about airport
(05:23):
security is that they're trained to spot a lie. They'll
notice in an instant if your palms are sweating, if
you avoid eye contact, if any part of your story
doesn't add up. Fooling them doesn't just require nerves of steel.
It takes an Oscar worthy performance. It was a chilly
January morning in Tehran and the airport was buzzing with
tense energy. Lines of stiff backed travelers inched through security,
(05:47):
speaking to one another, enclipped sentences while pretending not to
notice the machine gun toting soldiers hosted at every corner
in this scene. Walk to a group of filmmakers, you
could spot them a mile away, not because they were glamorous,
but because they were not. The filmmakers were the most
aggressively casual people in the terminal, sporting bell bottom jeans,
(06:08):
shaggy California haircuts, and oversized sunglasses. They carried bulging suitcases,
a few tattered movie scripts, and the kind of self
importance that you typically only find in Hollywood. The leader,
a man with a questionable mustache and an armful of
rolled up movie posters, stepped forward first. The name on
his paperwork was Kevin Costa Harkins, and, as he explained
(06:31):
to the Iranian immigration officer, he was a Canadian film producer.
He and his crew had spent the last few days
scouting locations for an upcoming sci fi epic that they
hoped to shoot in Iran's other worldly deserts. The officer
inspected Kevin's Canadian passport with the slow, deliberate suspicion of
a man who had heard every excuse in the book
(06:52):
and trusted none of them. And to be fair, he
had good reason to be skeptical. Iran was embroiled in revolution,
and tensions between the country and the West had never
been higher. A few months earlier, in November of nineteen
seventy nine, a group of Iranian students had stormed the
American embassy in Tehran and took more than fifty diplomats hostage.
(07:14):
Since then, the city had become one of the most
dangerous places in the world for Americans. Many Western countries
shuddered their embassies, warning their expats in the country to
get out as soon as they could. But Kevin and
his film crew had apparently not taken that advice. As
he explained to the immigration officer, movies couldn't wait for politics.
(07:34):
They had art to make, and besides, they were Canadian,
not American. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the
official stamped Kevin's passport, slid it back across the counter,
and waved him through. One by one. The others followed.
They held their breaths until the last boarding pass was checked,
the cabin doors closed, and the wheels finally lifted off
(07:56):
Iranian soil. Seated in coach with champagne trembling in paper cups,
the group exchanged shaky smiles They couldn't believe what they
had just pulled off, because they weren't filmmakers. They weren't
even Canadian. They were six American diplomats running for their lives.
During the chaos of the embassy attack in November, a
(08:16):
handful of Americans had managed to slip away. For months,
they'd hid inside the homes of Canadian diplomats, including the
Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor, who risked his life protecting them.
Working together, Canadian officials and the CIA brainstormed and discarded
countless plans to bring the diplomats home. It was Tony Mendez,
(08:38):
a CIA officer posing as Kevin, who suggested smuggling them
out on a commercial plane. He concocted the lie about
a sci fi film shooting in the Iranian desert, and
had ads for it printed in Iranian newspapers to lend
it legitimacy. Meanwhile, the Canadian embassy provided fake passports and
exit visas. The plan's only weak point was that it
(08:59):
read respired the diplomats to lie their way past Iranian
immigration officials without slipping. They weren't trained spies or actors,
and if they faltered for even a second, it would
mean prison or worse. Instead, they gave the performance of
a lifetime history remembers their daring escape as the Canadian Caper.
The Canadians just called it helping out a friend in
(09:22):
need in Hollywood. Well, they eventually made a movie about
the event. It's called Argo, after the fictional sci fi
film concocted by the CIA. Oh and just like the
performance that inspired the movie, it too proved to be
Oscar worthy. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of
(09:44):
the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey
in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another a
award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series,
and television show, and you can learn all about it
(10:06):
over at Theworldoflore dot com.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
And until next time, stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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