/ 3 August 2005

Passengers tell of panic in Toronto crash

Passengers who survived a plane crash on an Air France jet headed for Toronto have described their panic and confusion on Wednesday morning as the plane burst into flames after skidding off the runway into a ravine.

All 297 passengers survived the crash on Tuesday night. Seven Britons were among the passengers but it is not known if any of them are among the 22 who were injured.

Passengers on the Airbus A340 en route from Paris to Toronto said they had at first clapped and cheered as the plane touched down in Toronto, having had to fly in circles above the Canadian airport because of extremely bad weather.

But fear soon replaced their elation as the plane skidded off the end of the runway and fell into a ravine next to Toronto’s Highway 401, the busiest highway in Canada.

One passenger, Gwen Dunlop, returning to Canada from a holiday in France, said: ”It happened so quickly. It was a little bit like being in a movie.

”At some point the wing [came] off. The oxygen masks never came down. The plane was filling up with smoke.”

Dunlop said some passengers went down the emergency chutes, while others jumped out of the plane on their own.

Steve Shaw, a vice-president of the Greater Toronto airport authority, said the plane overshot the runway at Pearson airport by 200m and he believed the fire broke out after the passengers were evacuated.

”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.

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 broken jet ended up in a small ravine at the west end of the airport.

Once they were clear of the plane, passengers scrambled up the ravine in the pouring rain and hid beneath a bridge, worried the plane would explode.

Another passenger, Olivier Dubos, told the Canadian broadcaster CTV the lights in the plane went out a minute before the landing. ”It was scary, really, really scary,” he said.

He said some passengers had scrambled on to nearby Highway 401, where cars stopped, picked them up and took them to the airport.

Air France said concerned friends and relatives of passengers could call a freephone number on 0033 156 931000. The last big incident involving a western airline was when an American Airlines plane crashed after taking off from New York’s Kennedy Airport in November 2001.

In 1985 more than 50 people died in Manchester when strong winds exacerbated an engine fire on a British Airtours aircraft operated by British Airways.

The fire on the Mediterranean-bound plane led to a demand for passengers to be given smoke hoods on planes. – Guardian Unlimited Â