All 309 aboard survive Toronto jet crash

Next to Canada’s busiest highway
The flaming ruin was next to Highway 401, Canada's busiest, and some cars and trucks stopped on the roadway after the crash. The Toronto airport has been closed to other traffic, with planes diverted to Ottawa and other nearby airports.

Corey Marks said he was at the side of the highway when he watched the Air France plane touch down and crash.

“It was around 4 o’clock, it was getting really dark, and all of a sudden lightning was happening, a lot of rain was coming down,” Marks told CNN. “This plane ... came in on the runway, hits the runway nice. Everything looked good, sounds good and all of a sudden we heard the engines backing up. ... He went straight into the valley and cracked in half.”

Roel Bramar, a passenger on the flight, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that lightning may have struck the plane.

“Just as we landed the lights turned off,” he said. “I’m sure that the bad weather was what was responsible.”

Flight originated in Paris
Flight 358 was scheduled to arrive in Toronto at about 4 p.m. from Charles de Gaulle International Airport near Paris.

“They made an approach in weather that was worse than what they anticipated,” John Wiley, a retired Airbus pilot in Toronto, told CNN.

Thunderstorms create the possibility of wind shear, the sudden, dangerous air currents that can dash an airplane to the ground as it takes off or lands.

Toronto’s Lester B. Pearson International Airport handles more than 28 million passengers a year. Located 17 miles west of Toronto in the town of Mississauga, it has three terminals. Air France operates out of Terminal 3.

Past crashes
The last major jet crash in North America was on Nov. 12, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 lost part of its tail and plummeted into a New York City neighborhood, killing 265 people. Safety investigators concluded that the crash was caused by the pilot moving the rudder too aggressively.

Paris-based Air France-KLM Group is the world’s largest airline in terms of revenue. It is the product of the French flagship airline’s acquisition last year of Dutch carrier KLM. For the year ended in March, the company earned $443 million on revenues of $24.1 billion.

Air France-KLM operates a fleet of 375 planes and flies 1,800 daily flights, according to the company’s Web site. In the last fiscal year, it carried 43.7 million passengers to 84 countries around the globe.

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