An exclusive look at the moments following the crash landing of Air Canada Flight AC624 shows passengers huddled on the dark, snowy Halifax runway.
Some are shouting, others are shivering in nothing more than a T-shirt. One man presses an airplane pillow against his bleeding face.
Passenger Steve Dijkema began capturing the scene moments after climbing out of the plane.
Nearly half the passengers he saw were “bleeding from their face, some profusely,” he told CTV News.
His wife Sarah remembers passengers trying to get a safe distance from the crashed aircraft.
“Once we got off, I remember Steve just grabbing me by the shirt and like hauling me away, like run as far away from the plane as you can get,” she said.
Passengers grouped together for warmth as they waited for help to arrive. Dijkema himself was stuck standing on the tarmac without shoes. After emergency crews arrived, he was led off the cold ground into a firetruck, where he continued to film.
“I was left in the firetruck for a while by myself while they were trying to figure out what to do,” he said.
While emergency crews arrived immediately, passengers were still forced to wait up to 50 minutes on the runway before being shuttled away.
Halifax International Airport Authority spokesperson Peter Spurway said the process for such an operation was more complicated than it appeared.
“The airfield is a secure area, people driving vehicles there need proper certification, proper licensing to do that,” Spurway said. “And it’s quarter to one on a Sunday morning, so there are circumstances that combine to prevent a quicker response to that.”
Spurway called the emergency crew response “textbook,” but said the airport’s process for picking up passengers in emergency situations could be improved.
“We will work hard to develop protocols to shorten that time should such a situation, such an extraordinary circumstance, present itself again,” Spurway told CTV News. “I’m confident that we can do better than that.”
With files from CTV Atlantic
