Passengers recall frantic moments
Passengers recall frantic moments after Air Canada flight crashes short of Halifax airstrip in snowstorm
As it circled Halifax in a snowstorm late on Saturday night, Air Canada Flight 624 from Toronto was running out of fuel. If ground visibility did not improve soon, passengers were told, it would have to redirect to Moncton. But after about half an hour, the pilots received clearance for landing.
Minutes later, the plane lay crumpled on the ground, its nose cone, an engine and its landing gear shorn off by the force of an impact well short of the runway, followed by a sickening bounce, then another impact that took off an entire engine, and a long skid along the snow- covered tarmac.
On Sunday, a Transportation Safety Board probe was underway into the dramatic close call, which all 133 passengers and five crew survived without serious injury.
Investigators are trying to de- termine why the plane — which severed power lines and clipped an antenna — landed short, and the possible roles reduced visibility or automated guidance systems played in the incident.
Passengers told harrowing tales of fearing for their lives in the flight’s final moments.
In the front row of business class, Mike Magnus, was on the final leg of his journey home to Bedford, N. S., from Hong Kong.
The windows were dark, and on the final descent he could feel the buffeting of strong crosswinds. But there were no instructions from crew to prepare for a hard landing.
Rather, as the plane approached Halifax Stanfield International Airport, Magnus said there was a last minute thrust of the engines, as if to regain altitude.
“We were too far committed. We could not get back up ( into the air), we were just too far committed on the approach,” said Magnus. “I think ( the pilot) was trying to avoid the power lines, and I think he was just trying to reach the runway.”
The plane, a 25- year- old Airbus A320, severed power lines, briefly cutting electricity to the entire airport, and possibly hampering recovery efforts that left the passengers stranded on the tarmac in a snowstorm for nearly an hour. It also obliterated a scaffold that held the airport’s localizer system, which helps guide landings.
“We did not land on the runway. We hit short of the runway,” said Randy Hall of Mount Uniake, N. S., returning from a Mexican vacation, seated with his wife Lianne Clarke in the 18th row. He said a woman beside them was in shock after the first impact, and so he shoved her head down, as flight attendants shouted for everyone to do the same.
“Stupid old me, I looked out the window, and the next impact took the engine off,” Hall said.
“The second time we hit, we stayed on the ground, and then we slid for a while. And then that’s when people started to scream,” said Clarke.
“These people are extremely lucky that the airplane structurally remained, from a cabin point of view, intact, and there was no fire,” said Ron Coleman, an aviation safety consultant with CAVSCO who has 10 years experience leading plane crash investigations in Canada and abroad. “Normally when an airplane hits the ground, there’s considerably more damage than is indicated here.”
“The question here is why did he land short,” Coleman said. The landing was likely being done on autopilot, he said, which raises the potential of a system failure in the plane or ground- based guidance systems, but there is also evidence of impaired visibility due to snow, which might also be relevant if the pilot was in manual control.
“Regardless, it’s pretty obvious that they weren’t on the glide slope,” he said, referring to the proper trajectory that leads to the runway.
“It was safe to fly in this weather. The aircraft did circle for a period of time but when the approach was initiated, the weather was at the approach limits,” said Klaus Goersch, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Air Canada.
“We at Air Canada are greatly relieved that no one was critically injured. Yet we fully appreciate this has been a very unsettling experi- ence for our customers and their families, as well as our employees, and we are focused on caring for all those affected.”
When the plane came to a stop, as Magnus said “all hell broke loose.”
Up front, a stewardess opened the emergency hatch and deployed the slide, asking Magnus to head out first and help people at the bottom.
Further down the plane, Hall opened one emergency door while Karim Marzouk, a urology resident at Dalhousie University, opened another. The evacuation was swift.
“I just started screaming, ‘ Run, and run as fast as you can!’” Hall said.
“It was just completely surreal,” passenger Dominic Stettler told The Canadian Press. “I was running down the landing tarmac, and there was the smell of kerosene. I tripped over a big metal object, which must have been one of the components. It was just completely surreal ... I was talking to another woman who’s got kids, and we both said we kind of felt like cowards because we just ran and didn’t stop to help people. But we were just driven to get away from the plane for the sake of our families.”
Magnus said the pilots did not leave the cockpit immediately, and seemed to have been seriously injured. “Their faces were pretty smashed up,” he said. Both were treated in hospital and both have been released, Air Canada said.
As of Sunday, all but one of the 25 passengers admitted to hospital for minor injuries had also been released.