Eyewitnesses have described the moment Air Canada flight AC8646 crashed into a fire truck on the runway of New York's LaGuardia airport, killing two pilots and injuring dozens of others.
We were literally like 100 metres away, says 23-year-old Leo Medina, who was onboard another plane on the tarmac when the crash happened. It was like the plane got cut in half.
He told the BBC he then had to return to the gate after waiting in the airport for over 12 hours, sleeping on the floor on a bed of jackets.
Passenger Rebecca Liquori, who was on the plane arriving from Montreal that crashed, told News12 Long Island there was a loud boom just after it landed.
As we were descending, we hit a lot of turbulence, she said. Then we landed very roughly… Everyone felt it. It was like the plane jolted and you heard the pilot try to brake trying to prevent the collision.
As you heard the brake, a couple seconds later it was just a very loud boom, she said. Everybody jolted out of their seats. The crash, which occurred at 23:40 local time on Sunday, led to two pilots being killed and 41 others taken to the hospital, some with serious injuries.
In audio from the air traffic control tower at LaGuardia, a staff member can be heard saying: 'Truck One, stop, stop, stop!' in the seconds before the impact.
The truck had been called minutes earlier for a separate incident on another plane with a reported issue with odour, according to Port Authority executive director Kathryn Garcia. Liquori described passengers helping each other slide down a wing to exit the aircraft.
I'm just happy to be alive, she expressed. I would have never pictured a one-hour flight that I've done countless times… ending like this. Passenger Jack Cabot reported scenes of chaos: We went down for a regular landing… immediately hit something and it was just chaos from there… Everybody was hunkered down and everybody was screaming.
LaGuardia airport, one of the busiest in the US, has remained closed since the crash, resulting in hundreds of delayed or cancelled flights. It's scary. You never know if it could have been one of us, said Katie Rojas, whose flight was on the runway and ready to depart when the collision occurred.
