An airplane cabin filled with smoke as the plane caught fire when landing gear appeared to fail upon touchdown in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, on Saturday night.
All crew and the 73 passengers were able to exit the plane safely after it arrived from St. John’s, Newfoundland around 9:30 p.m., authorities said.
Air Canada Flight 2259, operated by PAL Airlines, was photographed with its wing on the ground after skidding down the runway. While wheels on the right side of the plane had clearly deployed, no wheels were visible on the left side of the plane.
“The plane started to sit at about a 20-degree angle to the left and, as that happened, we heard a pretty loud — what almost sounded like a crash sound — as the wing of the plane started to skid along the pavement, along with what I presume was the engine,” passenger Nikki Valentine told the CBC.
Passengers and crew saw flames from the left side of the plane, and smoke filled the cabin, witnesses told the CBC. Everyone on board was transported to the terminal by bus.
The incident forced Halifax Stanfield International Airport to shut down operations for about an hour. An Air Canada spokesperson said the Bombardier Q400 plane experienced a “suspected landing gear issue” as it arrived.
The rough landing in Halifax was one of several international airplane incidents in recent days. In South Korea, a plane crash-landed at Muan Airport, skidded into a concrete wall and exploded, killing 179 of the 181 people aboard. All the landing gear in that plane failed to deploy, according to investigators.
And on the other side of the continent, an Azerbaijan Airlines plane was shot out of the sky on Christmas Day in Kazakhstan. Azerbaijan leaders said Russian air defenses shot the plane down as it was traveling from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Grozny, Russia.