Air France Flight 358 - Accident

Accident

The accident occurred on 2 August 2005 at 20:03 UTC (16:03 EDT). Air France Flight 358, an Airbus A340-313E with 297 passengers and 12 crew, overshot the end of runway 24L at Toronto Pearson International Airport (in Mississauga, Ontario) and came to rest in a small ravine 300 metres past the end of the runway. All passengers and crew evacuated the aircraft successfully. Twelve major injuries and no fatalities resulted from the accident. The rest suffered minor or no injuries. A post-crash fire destroyed the aircraft.

The flight landed during exceptionally bad weather – severe winds, heavy rain, and localized thunderstorms near the airport (see weather, below) – and touched down further along the runway than usual. Some passengers report that the plane was rocking from side to side before landing, possibly due to turbulence and gusting winds associated with the storm systems. One passenger described the crash as like a "car accident, but it keeps going and going, non-stop."

The plane was cleared to land at 16:04 EDT on Runway 24L, which, at 9,000 feet (2,700 m) in length, is the shortest runway at Pearson Airport. After touchdown, the aircraft did not stop before the end of the runway, but continued for 300 metres until it slid into the Etobicoke Creek ravine, on the western edge of the airport near the interchange of Dixie Road and Highway 401.

After coming to rest, fire was noticed outside the aircraft, and an evacuation order was given. The two rear left exits remained closed due to the fire. On opening the emergency exits, one of the right middle exit slides (R3) deflated after being punctured by debris from the aircraft, while one of the left slides (L2) failed to deploy at all for unknown reasons. A number of passengers were forced to jump from the aircraft to exit. The actions of the flight attendants, who ensured that all of the passengers quickly evacuated, contributed to the safe escape of all passengers. The first officer was the last to leave the plane, which was evacuated within the required 90 second time frame.

Emergency response teams responded to the incident and were on site within 52 seconds of the crash occurring. The TSB official report states that "the first response vehicle arrived at the scene within one minute of the crash alarm sounding".

After the crash some passengers, including those who were injured, scrambled up the ravine to Highway 401 which runs almost parallel to the runway. Peel Regional Police located the first officer and several passengers along Highway 401, receiving assistance from motorists who were passing the airport when the crash occurred. Some motorists took injured people, including the pilot, directly to hospitals. Other motorists took non-injured passengers to the airport. The main fire burned for two hours, ending just before 18:00 EDT. All fires were out by early afternoon on 3 August 2005, and investigators were able to begin their work.

The accident caused the cancellation or diversion of hundreds of flights, with ripple effects throughout the North-American air traffic system. By that night, four of the five runway surfaces at Pearson were back in service, but the flight (and passenger) backlog continued through the next day.

The accident also snarled traffic throughout Toronto's highway system. Highway 401, one of the world's busiest highways, is the main route through the Greater Toronto Area, and the crash occurred near the highway's widest point where 18 lanes of traffic travel between Highway 403, Highway 410 and Highway 427. Though the fire was extinguished within hours, there was considerable congestion on the highway for days after the crash, due to motorists slowing down or even pulling over to get a look at the wreckage. Traffic flow was slowed due to numerous traffic collisions, prompting the Ontario Provincial Police to increase patrols along that stretch.

In 1978, Air Canada Flight 189 slid into Etobicoke Creek, the site of the AF358 crash, resulting in two deaths. The Air Canada DC-9 used the 24R-06L runway, crashing north of the AF358 crash scene and deeper into the ravine. The runway the Air France plane landed on, 24L-06R, is an east-west runway with a length of 2.7 kilometres (9,000 feet), so the plane did not land very far off the runway. After the crash of AF358, there were some calls for the ravine to be filled or spanned by a bridge. Others said that such an undertaking would have been prohibitively expensive. (Note: At the time of the crash of Air Canada Flight 189, the runway used by Air France 358 did not yet exist, and runway 24R-06L was numbered 24L-06R. The current runway 23-05 was, at that time, numbered 24R-06L)

This was the first time an Airbus A340 series was involved in a crash, ending its 14-year clean record. The aircraft involved entered service in 1999 and had its last maintenance check in France on 5 July 2005. It made 3,711 flights for a total of 28,426 flight hours.

One passenger took four photographs of the evacuation with his camera, which were released to the media. The final Transportation Safety Board of Canada report refers to the photographs and draws conclusions about the nature of the disaster based on the photographs. Mark Rosenker, the acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, criticized the concept of passengers taking photographs of disasters, stating, "Your business is to get off the airplane. Your business is to help anybody who needs help." Therefore, according to Rosenker, taking photographs during an evacuation of an airliner is "irresponsible". Helen Muir, an aerospace psychology professor at Cranfield University in the United Kingdom, stated that pausing during evacuations "is just what we don't want people to do." However, Muir added that photographs are "very valuable to accident investigators".