The first sign that something might be amiss came when the plane lifted abruptly into the air after the captain aborted his first attempt to touch down. The cabin fell gradually silent as the jetliner regained height and circled above the airport for several minutes.
Then on the final descent, the lights went out. The cabin was plunged into near total darkness. Storm-force winds buffeted and rocked the plane as the tarmac came up to meet it for a second time; the rain lashed down; outside, vivid flashes of lightning played.
”It was all black in the plane, there was no more light, nothing,” said one passenger, Olivier Dubois. Finally, the wheels touched down.
Many of the 297 grateful passengers on Air France’s daily flight 358 from Paris Roissy-Charles de Gaulle to Toronto’s Pearson international airport burst into ragged applause.
But their relief turned to horror as the plane failed to slow down, and according to some passengers, even seemed to gather fresh momentum.
Bags began flying out of the overhead luggage compartments. The aircraft slewed off the end of the runway and plunged into a shallow wooded gully, breaking apart as it went, before finally coming to a halt just metres from Highway 401, Canada’s busiest road.
Almost immediately, smoke and flames began billowing from the back, with flight attendants trying to prevent a stampede to the exits by insisting that the situation was actually under control.
”It happened so quickly; it was like being in a movie,” said Gwen Dunlop of Toronto, who was returning from a holiday in France. ”It was obvious straightaway that everything wasn’t OK. At some point the wing was off. The oxygen masks never came down. The plane was filling up with smoke.”
While passengers spoke of their panic and confusion as the Airbus A340 skidded off the tarmac, officials declared that the escape of all 309 people on board was remarkable.
Investigators said on Wednesday night that they had retrieved the black box flight data and voice recorders from the plane, which they hope will shed light on the drama.
The early presumption is that heavy rain, lightning and strong winds were probably all factors: the plane landed in what Brian Lackey of the Toronto airport authority said was ”definitely an extreme storm, something we haven’t seen in a long time”. He added: ”We’re very, very grateful that the situation turned out as well as it did.”
The evacuation of more than 300 people took less than two minutes, with a co-pilot the last to leave the flaming wreckage, the airport’s fire chief, Mike Figliola, said. Three-quarters of the passengers and crew were safely evacuated from the plane in the 52 seconds it took for the emergency services to arrive.
Air France says 22 people were slightly injured. The British foreign office said nine Britons were on board the flight and none of them was hurt. ”It is,” Canada’s transport minister, Jean Lapierre, said, ”nothing short of a miracle.”
Air France’s chairperson, Jean-Cyril Spinetta, declined to use the same word, but praised the training and professionalism of the plane’s 12-man crew, saying the co-pilot, who was in charge of the landing, and the 57-year-old pilot had more than 25 000 hours of flying time between them.
He promised passengers would be compensated for the ”physical, moral and material damage” they suffered.
Eddie Ho, a 19-year-old student from South Africa, said things had started ”falling apart about 10 seconds after the landing; bags were flying down”.
He added: ”An announcement came on, the captain said, ‘Everything is fine, remain calm in your seats.’ Now that’s a crazy announcement, if you ask me.”
Ho said that at first people had queued to evacuate, but once fire began spreading from the back of the plane, ”people were tripping over each other, climbing over the seats to get to the exit”.
A flight attendant told him to jump out of the front exit door where there was no chute, he said, but ”it looked like a 12ft drop”, so he ran to a second door that had a damaged chute. He took it nevertheless.
”I jumped, and fell on to some people,” he said. ”Some broke their arms or legs.”
Dunlop said one of the flight attendants had tried to calm passengers, ”and yet the plane was on fire and smoke was pouring in. I don’t like to criticise, but the staff did not seem helpful or prepared.”
Once off the plane, she said: ”We were all trying to go up a hill; it was all mud and we lost our shoes. We were just scrambling.”
Some passengers and crew reached the nearby road, where drivers picked them up and drove them to the airport.
Lauren Langille (15) was returning from France with an exchange student who was coming to stay with her family in Toronto. She said the flight attendants had been ”really good at calming you down”, and she was grateful to be alive.
”I was so happy to see people helping each other,” she said. ”I appreciate life more; I’m not going to take as much for granted.”
Lackey of the airport authority said the plane had had enough fuel to go on to another airport such as Montreal, ”but that’s the captain’s decision”.
The aircraft was still smouldering on Wednesday as experts from Air France, Airbus and the French and Canadian accident investigation services pored over the wreckage for clues. – Guardian Unlimited Â