Crash plane crew praised for "miracle" rescue

PARIS - The crew of the Air France plane which crash-landed at Toronto airport have been praised for the "textbook" way they evacuated the entire craft in two minutes after it overshot the runway and skidded into a ravine.

All 309 people on board either jumped out of the craft or slid down escape chutes with just seconds to spare before the plane erupted in flames. Nobody died and only 14 people suffered injuries serious enough to warrant hospital treatment. Some 42 people were taken to the hospital with minor injuries, most of them sustained as they fled the burning plane down emergency chutes.

The airport fire chief, Mike Figliola, said that by the time his crews arrived on the scene - 52 seconds after the crash - three-quarters of the passengers were already out.

At that point, the tail was already on fire and the heat was so intense that Mr Figliola felt his face burning from 50 yards away.

The last man off the plane was the co-pilot, who was at the controls as the Airbus A340 came to grief during a thunderstorm.

"This is what they're trained to do and they did it perfect," Mr Figliola told reporters.

"It was a textbook case of getting the plane evacuated."

Canadian air transport officials said they were hoping to retrieve the flight recorders and begin their investigation into the cause of the crash - just as soon as the blackened fuselage stopped smouldering.

"It's incredible, it's a miracle," Canada's Transport Minister Jean Lapierre said.

Canada's Transportation Safety Board said the weather was one of a number of "potential aspects" under investigation and a police spokesman said there was no indication that the crash was anything other than an accident.

Officials said there were still hot spots in the wreckage of the plane, more than 12 hours after the crash.

Initial assessments based on eyewitness testimony from the passengers and crew suggested the weather was at least partly to blame, and that the plane may have been struck by lightning as the wheels touched down on the runway.

Passengers said the lights unexpectedly went out as the plane was landing, causing ripples of alarm as lightning crackled around the plane. When the undercarriage hit the runway, people started clapping out of relief. Then came a sound like a blown tyre and the plane started to veer out of control.

"All of a sudden, everything went up in the air," passenger Roel Bramar told Canadian television.

"We had a hell of a roller-coaster going down the ravine."

As soon as the plane had thudded to a halt, the cabin crew began directing passengers out of the emergency exits. Two chutes at the front of the plane failed to open, according to one passenger who talked to the Toronto Sun newspaper, but attendants encouraged people to jump rather than wait any longer on the plane.

"People were falling on top of each other," said the passenger, identifying himself only as Eddie. At least one passenger broke a leg in the melee. The survivors scrambled up the side of the ravine and emerged on Highway 401 rain-soaked and caked in mud.

Passing motorists, as well as a hastily arranged convoy of airport buses, then scooped them up, and took them to the terminal building.

Investigators did not exclude the possibility that the problem was caused by a lightning strike at the moment of landing - possibly knocking out certain systems and leaving the pilots with insufficient time to knock the fuses back into place and fire them back up again.

Aviation experts in France, elaborating on that theory, warned yesterday that the increasing use of composite materials in aircraft construction could make them more and more vulnerable to lightning strikes.

And Air France accident investigator Francois Grangier said a lightning strike during landing could be difficult to handle.

"If it strikes just as the braking mechanism comes into play it can be a problem because the braking instruments are sensitive to electrical surges," he said.

"One can easily lose the ability to brake in those circumstances."

Air France managing director Jean-Cyril Spinetta left yesterday afternoon for Toronto accompanied by up to 30 staff including ground staff, a doctor, a psychologist and maintenance employees.

At a press conference shortly before he left Paris, Mr Spinetta said there had not been a safety discussion between air traffic controllers and the Air France crew before the aircraft was cleared to land.

"The Air France flight had been waiting to land and it was probably the first to land after the runways were reopened," he said.

Air France described the flight's 43-year-old co-pilot as a man with 'solid' experience, 'with more than 10,000 flying hours and who joined the company in 1985'.

Air France said the plane, an Airbus A340, had 28,418 flight hours and joined its fleet on Sept 7, 1999. It was last serviced on July 5, 2005, and it had no technical problems when it left Paris on its flight to Toronto.

Airbus Industries, which built the four-engine A340, refused to comment.

The A340-300 has a range of more than 11,000km, which makes it popular with more than two dozen carriers for long-haul flights.

- THE INDEPENDENT and REUTERS