TORONTO (AP) – 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.
It’s simply amazing every single person aboard that plane survived.
I can’t wait to hear the passengers’ and crew’s stories. Someone kept things calm and organized.
I thought I was the only one who made a joke about this… yours is better, though.
When I saw the headline on CNN reading “Pilot was attempting to land”, all I could say to my co-worker was “I think he succeeded.”
“I just flew in from Paris and boy my arms are tired… and my face is lacerated… I think I twisted my ankle… and my lungs are full of smoke.”
If Jerry Lewis told that joke, would the French hate him?
In the Canadian article linked by the Drudge Report,
nowhere does it say the plane was an Airbus.
If it were a Boeing plane, it would say so about five times.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1123014388624_118423588/?hub=TopStories
It was indeed an Air France Airbus 340 and what saved those people was that pesky slope
we’re Canucks and my father said with all the renovations done to the airport over the years why haven’t they filled in that ravine
I said that is what saved their lives, frankly, because if they had kept going I think they would have ended up crashing into a bridge and/or the 401, a major 6 – 8 lane highway during rush hour…..
[In the Canadian article linked by the Drudge Report,
nowhere does it say the plane was an Airbus.
If it were a Boeing plane, it would say so about five times.]
What I’ve been seeing is their playing up the “first Airbus crash ever”!! angle. Almost as biased as leaving the name out totally.