‘ TWENTY SECONDS LATER, WE’D ALL BE DEAD’
20 hurt, but everyone escapes after American Airlines flight catches fire just before take off at O’ Hare
Everything happened so quickly, there wasn’t even an announcement aboard the packed jet.
Then, passengers saw the flames. And the panic set in.
“People were just rushing out of the plane,” said Hector Cardenas, who’d been seated in the seventh row and captured the chaos on video. “People were just throwing themselves onto each other, pushing each other through the door and just throwing themselves out on the slides.”
But as terrifying as Flight 383 was for Cardenas and the other 170 passengers and crew members, it could have been much worse.
The Miami- bound American Airlines flight caught fire before takeoff Friday afternoon — spewing huge billows of black smoke across O’Hare Airport— but passengers and crew were able to escape the Boeing 767 on chutes, officials said. About 20 people were injured, with none of those injuries life- threatening.
American Airlines said in a statement that Flight 383 aborted takeoff at 2: 35 p. m. because of engine- related mechanical problems. A tire blew out, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, which is investigating.
Passenger Gary Schiavone of Demotte, Indiana, said there was a thud and then an explosion on the right side of the plane about 20 seconds after the plane began taxiing, before the plane had begun to lift off.
“First there was a clunk like the landing gear was going up, but a lot harder, then there was the explosion,” Schiavone said.
“What was I thinking: Flying. Just, I hate flying, and the worst thing happened that you can imagine,” Schiavone said. “Twenty seconds later, we’d all be dead.”
Schiavone said he could see a “big, red ball of flames” on the left side of the plane, and a passenger with a window seat said he could see the glass cracking fromthe heat.
Passengers and crew got off the plane by sliding down two emergency chutes.
The cabin began filling with smoke as passengers started getting off the plane. A few passengers tried to pull their luggage from the overhead compartments, the only hiccup in a largely orderly exit that took a little more than a minute, Schiavone said.
“This could have been absolutely devastating if it had happened later, if it had been further along in takeoff,” Fire District Chief Timothy Sampey said at a news conference. “There’s a thousand variables.” The plane did, however, have “ample room” to stop.
Firefighters arrived at the burning plane about a minute after the flames were reported by the control tower, Sampey said. The fire was knocked out in seconds with a chemical foam and dry chemical, he said.
The fire was the most “significant” at O’Hare in about eight years, Sampey said, and could have been far worse. A fully loaded 767 carries about 43,000 pounds of fuel, he said.
The plane was manufactured in 2003 and has a capacity for 218 passengers plus crew, records show.
Cardenas, a Chicago mortgage lender, posted an intense video of the inside of the plane, as passengers were about to escape via chutes.
In the video, the engines are still roaring. Some passengers are screaming, “Let’s go!” Others grab their luggage in overhead bins. Some are panicking. One woman screams, “Please.” The passengers are headed to the chutes when someone says “Jump and slide.” The video captures the slide down the chute with the airplane still on fire.
Cardenas said he called his mother as soon as he got off the plane to let her know he was all right.
“Once I was on that tarmac, you realize that it was a matter of 10 seconds for that thing to really be in the air. It would have been a lot worse. Catastrophic, I think.”
Passenger Sarah Ahmed, who said she was one of the last off the plane, told ABC7 that smoke came into the passenger compartment, and flames were up against the windows. Evacuating passengers panicked at that point.
“It was chaos,” Ahmed said. “I thought it was the day I was going to die.”
Jose Castillo Jr., of Orlando, said in an interview with the Sun- Times that his father, Jose Castillo Sr., escaped on a chute with other passengers.
“He told me they were taking off, and the plane was at full throttle, and there was an explosion on the right side and then on the left side.”
The younger Castillo said his father told him that engines on both wings appeared to be on fire.
“He said a couple of seconds later, if they were in the air, it could have been a disaster,” Jose Castillo Jr. said.
Castillo Sr. took videos of the plane, too, and sent that to his son.
One video shows passengers escaping from the front and back of the plane on chutes and running away from the plane while black smoke pours from the right side. Some of the passengers were screaming.