News & Politics - Plane Crashes in Toronto, ALL 309 passengers/crew survive!

**Mio** · 08-02-2005, 05:45 PM

Talk about a miracle...

Quote:

By ROB GILLIES and BETH DUFF-BROWN, Associated Press Writers

TORONTO - A jetliner carrying 309 people skidded off a runway while landing in a thunderstorm Tuesday, sliding into a ravine and breaking into pieces, but remarkably everyone aboard survived by jumping to safety in the moments before the plane burst into flames.

Twenty-four people suffered minor injuries in the 4:03 p.m. crash landing of Air France Flight 358 from Paris — the first time an Airbus A340 had crashed in its 13 years of commercial service.

The plane, carrying 297 passengers and 12 crew, overshot the runway by 200 yards at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, said Steve Shaw, a vice president of the Greater Toronto Airport Authority.

The aircraft skidded down a slope into a wooded area next to one of Canada's busiest highways, and some survivors said that passengers scrambled up to the road to catch rides with passing cars.

"The plane touched ground and we felt it was going off road and hitting a ravine and that's when we thought that was really the end of it," said Olivier Dubois, a passenger who was sitting in the rear of the aircraft.

"It was really, really scary. Everyone was panicking," Dubois told CTV. "People were screaming and ... jumping as fast as possible and running everywhere, because our biggest fear is that it would blow up."

Roel Bramar, who was also in the back of the plane, said he used an escape chute to get out of the plane.

"We had a hell of a roller coaster coming down the ravine," Bramar told CNN.

They said the power went off shortly before landing, perhaps after the plane was hit by lighting. But Dubois said he did not expect a crash landing and that there was no warning from the captain.

"It was very very fast," Dubois said. "As soon as the plane stopped, they immediately opened the side of the plane where we couldn't see anything and they told us to jump."

He said some passengers scrambled onto nearby Highway 401, where cars stopped, picked them up and took them to the airport. Two busloads of passengers were taken to an airport medical center.

Corey Marks told CNN he was at the side of the road when he watched the plane touch down and crash.

"It was around 4 o'clock, it was getting really dark, and all of a sudden lightning was happening, a lot of rain was coming down," Marks said. "This plane ... came in on the runway, hits the runway nice. Everything looked good, sounds good and all of a sudden we heard the engines backing up. ... He went straight into the valley and cracked in half."

A row of emergency vehicles lined up behind the wreck, and a fire truck sprayed the flames with water. A government transportation highway camera recorded the burning plane, and the footage was broadcast live on television in Canada and the United States.

A portion of the plane's wing could be seen jutting from the trees as smoke and flames poured from the middle of its broken fuselage. At one point, another huge plume of smoke emerged from the wreckage, but it wasn't clear whether it was from an explosion.

Airbus spokeswoman Barbara Kracht said the A340 has never crashed before in its 13 years of commercial service.

Chris Yates, an aviation specialist with Jane's Transport magazine, said the A340 is a very popular "workhorse" among carriers serving Asian and trans-Atlantic routes, with a very good safety record.

Although it was too early to draw any conclusions about the accident, Yates said, "we're probably talking about a weather-related issue here."

Although modern airliners are safer than ever, he said, extreme conditions can still be dangerous, especially during takeoff and landing.

"You can never account for weather," Yates said. "A thunderstorm can happen anywhere — it comes down to the judgment of the air traffic controller and the skill of the pilot to determine whether it's appropriate to land or to divert elsewhere."

Tuesday's airplane crash in Toronto came exactly 20 years after an American disaster that focused renewed attention to wind shear, a natural phenomenon that can make airplanes drop out of the sky.

While the cause of the Toronto crash has not yet been determined, the fact that it happened during a thunderstorm raises the possibility of wind shear.

The 1985 airline crash at Dallas-Forth Worth airport, which killed more than 137 people, made dealing with wind shear "a national imperative" for the U.S. federal government, said Larry Cornman of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Since then, he said Tuesday, systems to detect wind shear have been installed at almost all major airports in the United States. Cornman said the Canadian government investigated installing such systems during the 1990s, but added he did not know how many have been installed.

Wind shear is a sudden change in wind speed or direction. The most dangerous kind, called a microburst, is caused by air descending from a thunderstorm.

The last major jet crash in North America was on Nov. 12, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 lost part of its tail and plummeted into a New York City neighborhood, killing 265 people. Safety investigators concluded that the crash was caused by the pilot moving the rudder too aggressively.

Toronto's Lester B. Pearson International Airport handles over 28 million passengers a year. Located 17 miles west of Toronto in the town of Mississauga, it has three terminals. Air France operates out of Terminal 3.

Paris-based Air France-KLM Group is the world's largest airline in terms of revenue. It is the product of the French flagship airline's acquisition last year of Dutch carrier KLM. For the year ended in March, the company earned $443 million on revenues of $24.1 billion.

Air France-KLM operates a fleet of 375 planes and flies 1,800 daily flights, according to the company's Web site. In the last fiscal year, it carried 43.7 million passengers to 84 countries around the globe. That made it the largest European carrier in terms of the number of passengers carried.

The A340 is part of the A330/A340 family of six related aircraft, all sharing the same frame, manufactured by Airbus, which is 80 percent owned by European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co. Britain's BAE Systems PLC owns the rest.

The craft owned and flown by Air France is the A340-300. The plane, usually is equipped to carry 295 passengers, and fly 7,400 miles before refueling.

There are currently 237 of the A340-300 and its sister craft, the A340-200, in operation, according to the manufacturer.

Also check out the slide show that is attatched to the story. It's amazing that everyone survived.

**ROCKSTAR** · 08-02-2005, 07:34 PM

Ohhh thank God!!!!! I was watching the images on CNN praying nobody was hurt!

**In Fair Verona** · 08-02-2005, 09:10 PM

That is pretty miraculous, I'm glad that they're all allright.

**Quarterley** · 08-02-2005, 09:45 PM

I live in Toronto...kinda scared me today. I was glad people were alright. Whew!

pacifierrocks · 08-02-2005, 09:52 PM

Wow, somebody up there likes them. That is just so amazing. Talk about good luck.

**~+Yamiko** · 08-02-2005, 11:01 PM

It's amazing that everyone survived a crash.

But then again, I guess this is one of these moments that those involved have just crossed over...the Twilight Zone

-Kelly- · 08-02-2005, 11:46 PM

Wow...

Lexis · 08-03-2005, 02:49 AM

That was certainly very lucky for all those aboard - usually these things cause horrific injuries/deaths.

**Lost in Translation** · 08-03-2005, 04:57 AM

Wow, it was amazing no one was killed. I couldn't pull myself away from the tv.

**Quarterley** · 08-03-2005, 07:43 AM

The tail:

If it went a little further, it'd have went on the highway.

Globe and Mail Survivors' Stories (Aug. 3, 2005):

The Great Escape

By JOE FRIESEN , OLIVER MOORE and CAROLYN ABRAHAM

The descent seemed smooth as Air France Flight 358 from Paris approached Toronto yesterday. Sitting three rows back from the first-class section on the left side of the plane, Johnny Abedrabbo recalled some passengers had even begun to applaud the landing. Then, suddenly at 4:03 p.m., the 32-year-old economist heard an unsettling bump from the front of the plane.

"We were going a little too fast," he said. "The front tire blew up first, or something, because the plane took a dive and then it started shaking and then it swerved."

As the plane lurched to a stop, some passengers began to panic as they saw flames outside the windows. People started crowding the aisles, pushing and shoving against each other, trying to get out.

There seemed to be nowhere to go.

"I don't want to die today," Mr. Abedrabbo thought to himself.

"The last engine basically blew up while we were on the plane. Had we stayed a minute longer, we probably would have suffocated," he said.

"The thick black smoke was entering the cabin as we were leaving."

The emergency-exit doors opened, but the evacuation slides, he said, did not all work as expected. "The emergency chute was all jumbled up, so we had to jump on the grass itself."

They emerged in the gully at the edge of Etobicoke Creek and some scrambled their way out to wait for help under an overpass. Others, carry-on luggage in hand, strolled out into the downpour along the shoulder of the highway.

Yvonne Boland was white-knuckle driving through the deluge, heading westbound on Highway 401 to pick up her dog from the groomers shortly after 4 p.m. She noticed smoke along the side of the road, but was concentrating too much on the slick pavement ahead to pay much attention.

Then, between the east and westbound lanes of the country's busiest thoroughfare, she caught sight of four men striding through the rain, carrying small bags of luggage, mud-covered and sopping wet and trying to flag down motorists.

Her first thought was to drive on. She was a woman, alone, but then it hit her: "Cold, wet people coming on to the highway? It couldn't be anything but an emergency."

Ms. Boland got the four men into her station wagon.

"They were so thankful," she said. "They were dripping wet, and kept apologizing about my car [getting wet]. . . . Their brief cases and their bags were covered in mud."

Then the men, who seemed remarkably calm given their ordeal, told her that their Air France flight had skidded off the end of the runway.

One of them told her his feet were right by the wing and he said that he saw "something explode on the wing."

Along another stretch of pavement, Yasmin Ladak, a 26-year-old doctor who had been working in a poor area of the Himalayas and en route back from India on Flight 358, also found herself looking for a ride in the sheets of rain. A passing contractor stopped to pick her up and another anxious passenger, taking them both back to the airport for help, where their plane was to have landed at 3:35 p.m.

The Air France Airbus A-340 had flown non-stop from Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris and straight into the severe thunderstorm encircling Canada's largest city yesterday afternoon.

Off and on throughout the day the weather conditions had prompted Pearson International Airport to issue so-called Red Alerts, immediate halts to all ground activity that usually buzzes around planes as they take off and land on the tarmac. Passengers were stuck in their planes waiting for takeoff.

Even the people on Flight 358, which included 297 passengers and 12 crew members, knew the weather was bad enough to delay the landing, but that was all they knew.

Steve Shaw, spokesperson for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, confirmed the bad weather had delayed other planes. But Flight 358 had been cleared to land, he said. It was to touch down on runway 24L, which runs east-west just north of Highway 401, straddling a thatch of trees and ravine.

But it overshot its mark by 200 metres, Mr. Shaw said.

According to passenger Olivier Dubos, sudden darkness in the cabin was the first sign that something was amiss.

"Just before touching ground, it was black in the plane. There was no more light. Nothing. And it was going really, really fast and then we went off the runway," Mr. Dubos told CTV News.

"We were in the ravine and then there were a lot of flames. The plane stopped. We opened the emergency doors and basically there were lots of flames around. We just tried to escape sliding from the plane and running in the countryside.

"There was a lot of panic and we were all running everywhere. There was a lot of gas and smoke . . . we were all running like crazy," he said. "We were really, really scared that the plane would blow up because there were lots of flames."

But just as Mr. Abedrabbo discovered, Gilles Medioni, 22, who is visiting Toronto from Paris for a few days, said there was no chute at all emergency exits, so some people had to wait for a turn, while others jumped to the ground. Finding themselves in bushes and pouring rain, he said, "We didn't know where we were. We were wet and we were very cold."

Only minutes after running from the fire, JoAnn Cordary-Bundock called her husband, Don Bundock, from the side of Highway 401 to tell him she was okay. He was on his way to pick her up at the airport. But the pounding rain and roaring traffic made it very difficult for him to hear or understand her, so he called a friend to ask him to turn on the news as he continued driving.

Ms. Cordary-Bundock, an executive with Marriott Hotels had been travelling business class on the way home from Bangkok via Paris, said she could tell something was wrong on the plane's approach. "It wasn't normal. We were high over the runway," she said. "There was lots of extra wind sideways."

"There were bumps, bumps, bumps. I was going up and down in my seatbelt. Debris was flying all over the plane."

She said she was one of the first off the plane because the evacuation slide in business class deployed successfully, unlike at least one of those in the middle of the plane.

"It was panic, of course. You have to get off the plane," she said. "You could see the fire and black smoke."

She said she lost her shoes in the scramble to get out and then hiked up a ravine to safety.

Samantha Todd, who had been vacationing in England and flew back through Paris, also found herself shoeless after sliding down the chute. But the 16-year-old managed to keep her bags of shopping. "Most of the people in the plane were yelling for everyone to be quiet and calm."

Witnesses around the area of the airport described the scene as a "ball of fire" that sent massive plumes of black smoke billowing into the stormy skies.

Area hospitals readied their trauma units. By 5 p.m., officials at Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital had begun to prepare for the worst, calling in extra staff, readying beds and making plans to divert other emergency patients elsewhere. But it turned out to be unnecessary.

Despite the spectacular blaze that smouldered into the early evening, there were no fatalities. Even more remarkably, the GTAA's Mr. Shaw said only 24 people had to be taken to local hospitals and apparently none had serious injuries.

Even fleeing passengers were convinced there had been people seriously injured in the accident, particularly in the final moments as the crowd struggled to escape.

By 5:37 p.m., three airport shuttles, doubling as emergency buses, had picked up survivors from around the scene and arrived outside Terminal 3. Inside, passengers -- their hair wet, some dazed, others wrapped in blankets and shuddering -- were made to wait for several minutes while authorities deliberated about where to send them.

Mr. Abedrabbo was not impressed with the detours: "We were transferred from one hole to another hole then the hotel."

Several times during yesterday evening's press conference, the GTAA's Mr. Shaw said the rescue operation had gone smoothly, a credit to the repeated emergency drills the airport has run over the years. But Mr. Abedrabbo was critical just the same: "I'm not very impressed by the way the airport handled this. I would have thought that they would have more definitive procedures."

Meanwhile, outside the Sheraton Hotel, within sight of the emergency shuttles ferrying the passengers, anxious family members stood just metres away craning for a glimpse of their loved ones. But that was all they would get before the shuttle drove off.

The family members were then shepherded into the hotel's Geneva Room, a large banquet area. Among them were David and Marika Paquin, whose 17-year-old daughter Stephanie was returning from a one-month student exchange in France with 30 to 40 youths. The Paquins had not seen their daughter on any of the shuttles, but at 6 p.m. their cellphone rang and their anxiety lifted -- it was Stephanie. Relief washed over Ms. Paquin's face as she listened to her daughter's voice and broke out laughing.

Her daughter told her mother that everyone she was travelling with was okay. "She said, 'We're all fine,' " Ms. Paquin said. Her daughter told her they were sitting in their seats, and that they, too, thought it had been a safe landing. She described smoke starting to fill the cabin and people shouting to get off the plane.

She also described the chaos of people pushing and shoving to get out and how once they made it out they found themselves climbing over rocks to escape the fiery debris."When I was on the plane, it seemed fine, it seemed level," said Stephanie, a Grade 12 student from Woodbridge, Ont. "But when I was off the plane, it was almost on its side. One of the wings was on fire. It was like in the movies," she said. "I looked at the airplane and thought, 'Oh my God, I didn't know it was that serious at all.' "

She said it was several minutes after the plane came to a stop before the pilot came on the intercom to tell everyone to leave. She said it was at that point that "people were just pushing, they didn't care about anyone else."

She said she slid down the emergency chute at the back of the plane and crashed into a group of people stuck at the bottom of the slide. It was raining and slippery, she said, and they were having trouble getting up. She was carrying a bag of luggage that she had salvaged from the plane, and as she tried to climb up the ravine to safety, she slipped and fell. "It was really hard," she said. "Everyone was trampling over everyone."

Then, a girl about her age wearing white pants came to her aid and pulled her up the ravine.

After escaping the wreckage, Ms. Paquin said she was ushered to an airport shuttle, which, after a long wait, took her to a building within the airport complex. She and the other passengers were kept there until almost 10 p.m.

"We were just sitting down," she said. "No one knew anything."

She added that after a long wait, officials took the names and seat numbers of the passengers, and a photograph of each.

Hamon Pauline, a teenager visiting Canada from France, who had also been picked up off the highway, said the lengthy airport processing procedures meant she was unable to call her parents until about 10 p.m. Eastern Time, nearly 4 a.m. in France. She said her parents were worried and relieved to finally hear from her. She said she didn't know why it took so long for her to get access to a phone. Similarly, Ms. Ladak found that once her kind Samaritan dropped her at Pearson, she found herself searching for an official to identify herself as a surviving passenger.

When Ms. Ladak finally found an airport official, they took her to another facility within the airport, where she was reunited with other passengers. The officials then took down everyone's names, organized them alphabetically and took their pictures.

"It was quite a long and arduous process. I don't know why it was taking so long," Ms. Ladak said. She was released after 10 p.m., and found her brother waiting for her as she walked out.Certainly, the experience left its mark on passenger Lauren Langille. "I appreciate life a lot more. I'm not going to take it for granted."Ms. Boland had lent her unexpected car passengers her cellphone.

As they drove along, Ms. Boland spotted an ambulance and followed it, even driving around a barrier, toward a cargo area of the airport.

The four survivors who had hitched a desperate ride to safety thanked her profusely before they disappeared into the airport building, and refused to leave her in the rain to say goodbye and wish them well.

"They stopped me from getting out of the car," said Ms. Boland, who never did get their names.

**Mio** · 08-03-2005, 10:36 AM

The Winnipeg Sun has a picture of the plane resting in the gulley.

**Quarterley** · 08-03-2005, 03:03 PM

Like this?

Sofa · 08-03-2005, 09:05 PM

This is amazing. So happy everyone is alive.