A340 Airbus crashes in Toronto

[Paul Gagnon]

At 16:03 EDT today an Air France A340 overshot the runway by 200 metres and crashed into the ravine of Etobicoke Creek at Toronto's Pearson International Airport. It was all over the news this afternoon. Miraculously nobody was killed. If it had been going faster the plane could have ended up on Hwy 401 at it's busiest point.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/08/02/airfrance050802.html

More than 300 passengers and crew on board an Air France flight escaped from a fiery wreck when their plane skidded off the runway on Tuesday afternoon at Toronto's Pearson Airport. Only 43 people received what were described as minor injuries.

The plane, an Airbus A340-300 was en route from Paris' Charles de Gaulle Airport and landed in Toronto at 4:03 p.m. EDT. The weather at the time was severe, with high winds, heavy rain and lightning.

 

[jimbo74]

yup heard about this way earlier in the day... they ran a thing about it about 12 hours ago on the bottom of tv screens..... i beleive it was 12 crewman and 297 passengers i think... 43 minor injuries, no deaths.....

 

[00XLS]

SImply awesome no one died, I wonder if it was because of the size of it?

 

[Rick]

Amazing thing... I heard people hitchhiked back to the airport after running away from the crash scene

 

[Rhett]

They were all lucky. What I don't understand is how in the hell a trained flight crew could have overshot the runway by 600 feet. 50 feet, 100 feet, I can understand. But 600 feet?? Why didn't they do a go-around? They must not have had any situational awareness... That's pretty bad in this era of computer assisted ILS (instrument) approaches, no matter the weather.

They are trained to land with zero visibility on those ILS approaches.

 

[BeauJ]

That is nuts

 

[JDraper]

I was on one of the last flights in to Toronto before the accident happened. Just as we landed, they were closing down the airport due to heavy weather. My tech rep picked me up at the terminal and we went to the Airport Renaissance hotel to wait for the other guy we were meeting (flying in from Calgary). We're sitting in the bar, and two planes (one Air Canada and one Air France) came in right over top of the hotel as the thunderstorm came on full force. We commented about how nuts they were to try and land in the weather. About 5 minutes later, the bar TV lights up with the story on the crash....we look around the corner of the hotel, and there is smoke EVERYWHERE!!! Made it really tough to breathe outside. Then we get a call from our buddy on his airplane. He's on the tarmac, but they're not letting them go to the gate or get off the plane. They sat there for 4 hours before they embarked, and then had another 4 hours before he got his baggage...What a Cluster F**k! We were supposed to meet up and drive out to Trenton for the night. We ended up leaving before he got off the tarmac. Took us 2 hours just to get from the airport area to the 407 because all of the traffic was re-routed around. Our guy finally made it up to Trenton about 9 hours later....

And now I'm back in Toronto to take a flight back tomorrow morning......

 

[JDraper]

They were all lucky. What I don't understand is how in the hell a trained flight crew could have overshot the runway by 600 feet. 50 feet, 100 feet, I can understand. But 600 feet?? Why didn't they do a go-around? They must not have had any situational awareness... That's pretty bad in this era of computer assisted ILS (instrument) approaches, no matter the weather.

They are trained to land with zero visibility on those ILS approaches.

This may or may not be pilot error. We'll see when they are interviewed and the data recorders are read. Several passengers have said that the power went out in the aircraft as it landed (lots of lightning in the area), and the theory that a microburst occurred near the plane and the updraft outside of the microburst lifted the plane up and caused it to land too far down the runway has also been presented.

Don't pass judgement on the pilots until the facts come out....a lot of speculation is going on but no one has the facts yet.

 

[98Explorer4x4]

The plane got struck by lightning while it was landing according to the Weather Channel. Caused smoke and problems with the landing. Also its not hard to overshoot a runway with a 360,000+ lbs plane and t-storms in the area. The two dont mix! I'm not an expert but do have a pilots license.......glad everyone survived but again thanks to the way the plane was built.