Everyone on plane survives crash landing
HONG KONG — When Bill Jaynes realized the water was up to his waist, he knew something was wrong.
Jaynes, a Micronesian journalist, was aboard a plane set to land on Weno, the tiny Pacific island that is part of the Federated States of Micronesia.
“We came in low, we came in very low,” he said in a Facebook video, describing how the Boeing 737-800 flown by Air Niugini approached Chuuk International Airport on Friday, but ended up short of the runway and in the Chuuk lagoon.
“I thought we landed hard until I looked over and saw a hole in the side of the plane and water was coming in,” he said, “and I thought, well, this is not, like, the way it’s supposed to happen.”
But then help suddenly arrived — from a flotilla of local boats that helped all 47 passengers stranded aboard the aircraft. Everyone made it off alive.
“It’s just surreal,” said Jaynes, managing editor of The Kaselehlie Press, a newspaper on Pohnpei, another Micronesian island.
Matthew Colson, a Baptist missionary who lives on Weno, recorded the rescue effort and posted his interview with Jaynes on Facebook. He said the locals who rushed their boats to the scene were fisherman and construction workers.
“They’re people that come here to go to work or go to the store or bring fish to the market to sell,” Colson said. “They just jumped in their boats and started helping.”
In a statement, Air Niugini thanked the locals who had rushed to the plane’s aid and noted that a few passengers were injured in the incident. While the airline did not provide details of the cause of the crash, it said it had received information that “the weather was very poor with heavy rain and reduced visibility at the time of incident.”
But it could have been much worse. Images posted to social media showed the small boats racing to the site of the crash, surrounding the aircraft as it slowly sank in the lagoon, just off the airport. Pictures posted by bystanders two hours after the plane crashed showed it fully submerged in the water, which is up to 100 feet deep in some places.
Chuuk Lagoon is a popular diving destination and the site of sunken Japanese ships that were bombed by the U.S. military during the Second World War.
“Chuuk has a lot of outboard engines and boats out there,” said Glenn Harris, an aviation security inspector for Micronesia’s Department of Transportation. “Everybody came together and rushed to the plane and rescued the passengers.”