Jet burns after skidding off runway in Toronto

Fourteen people were known to have suffered minor injuries in the 4.03 pm crash landing of Air France Flight 358 from Paris to Toronto.

The crash occurred in a wooded area next to one of Canada’s busiest highways, the 401, and some survivors said that passengers had 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 at the rear of the A340 Airbus.

"People were screaming and jumping as fast as possible and running everywhere, because our biggest fear is that it would blow up," Dubois told CTV (Canadian Television).    

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

"It was very very fast," he 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 centre.

Another passenger, Roel Bramar, told Canadian Broadcasting Corps, "I saw lightning, maybe the plane had already been hit by lightning that’s because just as we landed the lights went off.

"I got the idea the pilot wanted to lower the plane as soon as possible because there was such a rough storm," he said.

Steve Shaw, a vice president of the Greater Toronto Airport Authority, said there were 297 passengers and 12 crew aboard the plane. He said the jet overshot the runway by 200 yards and he believed the fire broke out after the passengers were evacuated.

Air France also announced in Paris that there were no fatalities in the crash.

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 if it was from an explosion.

Toronto’s Lester B Pearson International Airport handles more than 28 million passengers a year. Located 17 miles (27 kilometres) west of Toronto in the town of Mississauga, it has three terminals. Air France operates out of Terminal Three.

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

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 US$443 million (euro362.61 million) on revenues of US$24.1 billion (euro19.73 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.