Dominican plane with 126 people onboard crash-lands at Miami Airport

Blog
Dominican plane with 126 people onboard crash-lands at Miami Airport | Secret Flying

Plane crash-lands at Miami Airport after landing gear fails.

 

A plane carrying 126 people caught fire after it was forced to crash land at Miami International Airport when its front landing gear failed.

 

The Red Air plane arriving from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, skidded along the runway, ripped through a communications tower and came to a stop on the grass.

 

Videos and images posted on social media show the nose of the MD-82 plane destroyed. Black smoke was emanating from one of the wings, which had metal from the communications tower attached to it.

 

In one video, passengers can be seen scrambling from the aircraft as it bursts into flames.

 

Another video shows the panic inside the aircraft as passengers exit the aircraft via the emergency slide.

 

 

“I thought I was going to die, actually,” Paola Garcia told CBS Miami. “There was an old man next to me and I was hugging him. It was horrible.

 

“We were bumping from side to side and all the windows like break and then everything’s fine. Then the people start running and running and I like jump and start running because there was fire and all that.”

 

Weighing in on the crash, aviation expert Scott Harrington told CBS News that it is a miracle that more people were not hurt in the plane crash.

 

“It seemed like the pilots did a good job to keep it all in one piece. To get it stopped so the plane could be stopped in a position so rescue equipment can access the airplane,” he said.

 

“We are just hyper-focused. Our brain goes into flight mode. We are focused on the problem, focused on taking care of the solution as much as we can. Sometimes if a mechanical part breaks, there’s really not a whole lot we can do.”

 

Airport officials said that the collapse of the front landing gear in the nose of the aircraft appeared to be the cause of the fire.

 

The National Transportation Safety Board posted on Twitter that a team would investigate the incident.