Television cameras captured dramatic images of an Air France passenger jet in flames moments after the packed plane apparently skidded off a runway and fell into a ravine on Tuesday night.
Steve Shaw, a vice-president of the Greater Toronto Airport Authority, said there were no fatalities among the 297 passengers and 12 crew on board the plane. Fourteen people suffered minor injuries.
He said the jet, an A340 Airbus en route from Paris to Toronto, overshot the runway at Pearson airport by 200 yards and that he believed the fire broke out after the passengers were evacuated.
A Toronto radio station said some of the passengers were seen climbing from the plane.
Television pictures, beamed around the world, showed black smoke billowing from the wreckage and at one point a fireball appeared to erupt from the front end of the fuselage. Emergency vehicles lined up behind the broken aircraft in a wooded area near Highway 401, Canada’s busiest highway, and a fire truck doused the flames.
The plane was believed to have been trying to land in bad weather.
”There was quite a downpour. The visibility was really bad, with lots of lightning,” said John Finday, a CBC News journalist who was at the airport filming a weather-related story.
Debbi Wilkes, who was driving alongside the airport, said it was ”pouring rain” and ”pelting with hail” at the time.
”We saw a bolt of lightning come down and hit something,” she said.
Corey Marks, a plane-spotter who was sitting in his car at the end of the runway, told CNN: ”It was getting really dark and lightning was happening and rain was coming down.
”I saw the plane coming down on the runway and it sounded good and looked good, but suddenly we heard its engine backing up. There are no barriers after the runway and it ran down off a grassy area into a valley and cracked in half.”
The jet ended up in a small ravine at the west end of the airport.
A man who identified himself as a survivor, Olivier Dubos, told CTV the lights in the plane went out a minute before the landing. ”It was scary, really, really scary.”
He said some passengers scrambled on to nearby Highway 401, where cars stopped, picked them up and took them to the airport.
Flight 358 was the daily scheduled flight between Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and Toronto. It departed the French capital at 1.52pm and was due to land in Toronto at 4.12pm.
The incident happened as most operations at Toronto airport were grounded because of severe thunder storms.
The last major jumbo jet crash in North America was in November 2001, when an American Airlines flight lost part of its tail and fell into a New York City neighbourhood, killing 265 people. Investigators concluded that the crash was caused by the pilot moving the rudder too aggressively. – Guardian Unlimited Â