On the night of August 24, 2001, an Air Transat Airbus A330 was cruising at 39,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean, roughly four hours into a flight from Toronto to Lisbon.
On board were 293 passengers and 13 crew. In the cockpit sat Captain Robert Piché, 48, and First Officer Dirk de Jager, 28.
A fuel leak had opened in the right engine, caused by a maintenance fault the crew could not see from the cockpit. The readings looked like a simple imbalance rather than fuel draining out of the aircraft.
At 39,000 feet, still 150 nautical miles from the nearest runway, the right engine flamed out from fuel starvation.
Piché began a controlled descent and declared a fuel emergency. The crew turned toward Lajes Air Base in the Azores, a single strip of runway surrounded by ocean.
Thirteen minutes later, at 65 nautical miles from Lajes, the left engine died too.
The Airbus A330 was now a 155-tonne aircraft with no engines, sinking through the dark with 306 people aboard and one island somewhere ahead of it.
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Piché had learned to fly decades earlier as a bush pilot in rural Quebec, landing light planes on short, rough strips with no autopilot and no room for error. He was also an experienced glider pilot.
He flew the dead Airbus the way he had once flown gliders, trading altitude for distance, aiming the nose at a runway he could not yet see.
For 19 minutes, with no engines and no second attempt available if he misjudged the approach, Piché held the aircraft on a line toward Lajes.
The jet touched down hard on the runway at Terceira Island. Several tires blew on landing and the brakes caught fire. Every one of the 306 people aboard survived.
It remains the longest unpowered glide by a commercial airliner on record.
Investigators later found that the crew had not diagnosed the fuel imbalance correctly earlier in the flight, and assigned Piché and de Jager partial responsibility for how the emergency developed in the first place.
Both facts are part of the same night. The mistake happened. So did the landing that came after it.
Piché had also served prison time in the 1980s for smuggling marijuana by plane, a fact that became public only after the Azores landing made him well known. He had been hired by Air Transat years after his release, on the strength of the flying he still knew how to do.
A man's record does not always predict the moment that ends up defining him. Piché's did not.
Most of what a man builds, whether it is a business, a reputation, or a family's sense of who he is, gets tested in the one hour he did not plan for.
If everything you had built your competence on failed at once, with hundreds of people behind you and no second approach if you got it wrong, would your training still hold?