A Thunder Bay woman uses the word ‘surreal’ in describing what happened on board an Air Canada Express plane that caught fire just before take off in Toronto.
Mary Long-Irwin says she saw the flames last night at around 8, as the flight attendant calmly, but very loudly, told everyone to leave their baggage and get off.
“You know how it taxis and then it stops, and it’s ready to just ‘give ‘er’?…. it was just then, the flames were quite high, they were coming from the wheels, and they were quite high, they had already reached our window.”
The local woman was on a business trip heading to Sudbury.
“I could hear the flight attendant yelling ‘Evacuate, fire, evacuate, now!!’ But it took me a second to compute those 2 things, because I was sort of surprised at how the flight attendant was firm and very loud.”
The local woman tells us she flies often for work, adding this has never happened to her.
She remembers the flight attendant calmly barking orders.
“‘Evacuate, evacuate, get off the plane’, and then he told them to leave their luggage and tried to get everyone off. It was quiet, but then on the ground, there were some people who were visibly upset. If it had happened a minute later we would’ve been in the air.”
Long-Irwin adds everyone saw the fire get extinguished by the fire department as they waited on the runway.
A bus soon picked them up, and following that they had to wait a few hours to get their luggage.
They were given hotel and dinner vouchers, and this morning, she continued on another flight.
In a statement to our newsroom, Air Canada tells us “The crew experienced an issue with the left main brakes. The crew quickly halted the aircraft and the passengers were deplaned immediately. Emergency response crews arrived and extinguished the flame from the left brakes. There were no injuries. The aircraft will undergo a thorough inspection.”
