Robert Piché

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Robert Piché (born in 1953, Mont-Joli, Québec) Canadian pilot and captain on Air Transat Flight 236, which he managed to land safely in the Azores on August 24, 2001, following a complete engine failure in both engines due to fuel exhaustion. Piché and his co-pilot were later assigned partial responsibility for the accident.

[edit] Personal history

During the 1980s, Piché was sentenced to five years in prison for flying illegal drugs into Georgia, USA. He was released after serving part of his sentence, and later pardoned in 2000 because the state considered him fully rehabilitated.[1]

[edit] Emergency landing

Main article: Air Transat Flight 236

Immediately after performing a successful dead-stick landing of an Airbus 330 in the Azores, Piché was praised by media and was celebrated as a hero, especially in Quebec (where he remains a popular speaker[2]). However, while the primary cause of the accident was improper maintenance, the final investigation also assigned the flight crew partial responsibility for failing to detect the fuel situation earlier, failing to notice the symptoms of a fuel imbalance, and failing to use the procedural checklist when attempting to rectify the imbalance (relying instead on memory) and thus missing an important caution note that might have prevented them from porting more fuel to the leaking side.[3][4]