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So, it was only fitting Capt. Pearson was on hand Sunday when a Mississauga auction house, Collectable Car Productions, tried to sell the Gimli Glider, which has spent the past five years in the Mojave Desert after being retired from Air Canada’s fleet in 2008.

“I’m happy because I was on the last flight to Mojave,” Capt. Pearson said. “It’s been there for five years, and it’s just going to deteriorate if it stays there.”

The current owners of the plane, an unnamed California-based aircraft lessor, were hoping to get between $2.5-million and $3-million for the Gimli Glider.

But Terry Lobzun, a spokesman for Collectable Cars, said the highest bidder came in Sunday far short of that mark at $425,000. He said Collectable Cars will now go back to the bidders to see if there’s a way to drive up their offers, or if they can get a group together to raise the funds. But he said the ‘For Sale” sign on the Gimli Glider remains.

“The whole objective of the exercise was to create some interest in it, or if there are some people out there, or maybe a group, that collectively can take some time to put something together,” he said, noting the 30th anniversary of the incident is this year.

“This might buy us some time, and we’ll have another kick at the can,” Mr. Lobzun said.

That was the only scary part of the trip — when I looked up and there were three boys on bikes maybe a 1,000 feet further down runway

The story of the Gimli Glider is the stuff legends are made out of.

It started when the maintenance crews for Air Canada Flight 143 discovered a shoddy soldering job had knocked out the computer that calculates how much fuel was needed to get the plane from Montreal to Edmonton, with a brief stopover in Ottawa.